A Million Documents At Your Fingertips

In our last post, we mentioned that we were already working with other organizations that support judicial transparency to help us build the public repository that lies at RECAP's foundation. Public.resource.org, led by Carl Malamud, has been especially helpful in this regard. They have a vast repository of court documents, weighing in at more than 500 gigabytes in total. Over the last few weeks we've been pre-stocking the archive with these documents, and we recently crossed the million document threshold.

What this means is that installing RECAP will not only help you contribute to government transparency, but it's likely to start saving you money right out of the gate. For example, if you practice law in New York City, you'll be happy to know that we have 238,098 documents from the Southern District of New York. If you have RECAP installed, you can use PACER the way you normally do, and RECAP will automatically inform you if the document you need is already available for free.

Here is a table of the other courts where we have a significant number of documents:

Court No. of Documents

District of Alaska 52,797 Northern District of California 190,470 District of the District of Columbia 219,049 District of Delaware 182,900 Central District of Illinois 21,378 District of Massachusetts 217,315 Southern District of New York 238,098 Eastern District of Pennsylvania 20,530

We anticipate importing about a million more documents from Public.resource.org in the coming weeks. The good folks at Justia have also expressed interest in contributing to the repository.

Unfortunately, even after we import all the documents from these organizations, we will still be several million documents short of our goal of a comprehensive, free repository of court records. That's where you come in. By installing the RECAP public beta, you can make an important contribution to the goal of free public access for all.