Our 2021 Annual Letter

Free Law Project is a non-profit that uses advocacy, technology, and data to improve the justice system. Today we're asking for your support so that 2022 can be the best year ever for RECAP, CourtListener, and all we do.

Read on to learn more about what we've been up to or click below to give us your support.

FLP's Year in Review

2021 has been a momentous year for Free Law Project. The highlight of the year came in September and October, when our work supported a series of front-page articles in the Wall Street Journal. These articles exposed over 100 judges with financial conflicts that had failed to recuse from over 600 cases. We submitted written testimony to Congress and expect Congress to soon pass a bill to prevent such failings in the future (the House is voting this week!).

In the PACER world, the bill to make PACER free is finally gaining momentum again, after we labeled PACER a national security concern. We expect updates on this very soon. We are also continuing our crusade to add recent filing feeds to every federal court. We'll be sending a letter about this to about 50 courts early next year.

A new project we're working on is a tool to find badly-made redactions in PDF documents. Soon, we will run it across millions of legal filings so that we can identify which organizations are failing to redact information. This will be another blockbuster report, when we reveal dire redaction failures in numerous federal filings.

We will spend time next year promoting this tool so that bad redactions will become a thing of the past.

In addition to our advocacy work, we have continued expanding and supporting RECAP and CourtListener.

In 2021, we:

• Added a new tagging feature to dockets so that cases can be tagged and shared
• Launched a new legal citation extractor that finds nearly any legal citation
• Greatly expanded our collection of opinions in several states

Behind the scenes, we were proud to:

• Rebuild our homepage so that it finally shows what we're all about
• Receive a PAGI award from the American Association of Law Librarians
• Add several new security protections to CourtListener that can rapidly detect and deter hackers
• Transition to storage.courtlistener.com so viral documents can be downloaded by millions of people without a hitch
• Move our servers to a more reliable provider
• Identify and report a security bug in the Python programming language (this makes the Internet itself more secure)

We've been growing and it's been busy!

Looking Forward to 2022

Next year is going to be a very big one. As always, we plan to expand on our current projects while starting a few new ones.

We plan to:

• Continue pushing for feeds of new filings in all federal courts
• Pass the bill to tamp down judicial conflicts
• Pass the bill to make PACER free
• Continue pushing for a FOIA-like bill for the judicial branch
• Increase awareness of problematic redactions
• Vastly expand our collection of opinions so it is one of the best online
• Finally add appellate support to the RECAP extension

And of course, we'll continue supporting our thousands of users of CourtListener.com and the RECAP Extensions.

Please Support Our Work

All the achievements and initiatives above take considerable effort. We believe our work leads to a more open, transparent, and innovative judicial system. In 2022, with your support, we hope to do even more.

If you have benefited from our work this year or if you find our work valuable, we ask that you please donate today. We need your support to do our work.

Free Law Project is a federally recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit. Donations are tax deductible.

The 2021 Free Law Project Index

31 million — the number of times computers used our APIs this year

5.1 million — the number of those requests that were from the RECAP Extensions (thank you!)

5.3 — the number of times you could watch every Law & Order episode ever made instead of listening to all the oral argument we added

95 million — the number of pages of legal filings we have in the RECAP Archive

475 tons — how much the entire RECAP Archive would weigh, if printed

8,000 tons — the weight of the books in the Library of Congress if they average one pound each

33 million — the number of PACER dockets added to the RECAP Archive in 2021

30 million — the number of docket entries added

150,000 — the number of entries added per work day in 2021

5.8 million — the number of pages in those documents

Thank You

This past year we have had support from many sources including individuals, organizations, and academic departments, too numerous to list here.

Thank you all for your generous support as we head into the next year.