Our 2022 Annual Director's 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 2023 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. Thank you.

FLP's Year in Review

The last year at Free Law Project was one of growth, both for the organization itself and in our ability to hit ambitious, diverse goals. Our mission statement is to "use technology, data, and advocacy to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive," and I'm proud to say that in 2022 that's exactly what we did.

On the policy and advocacy side, we were instrumental in passing the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which led to the judiciary building a new public database of judicial financial disclosures. We opposed efforts by the judiciary to pass an unconstitutional Internet censorship bill that would force us and other organizations to remove information from our websites. We worked with the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley to analyze and sketch out a new FOIA-like bill for the judiciary (more on this in 2023). And we made meaningful progress in our long push to make PACER free.

On top of this, our director went to D.C., where he presented to the House Transparency Caucus, was selected as a member of the PACER user group hosted by the judiciary, and made allies on the Hill that we can work with to improve the judiciary. Finally, with generous pro bono support, we stood up for open legal data by fighting two lawsuits that aimed to take public legal information off CourtListener and other websites.

On the technical side of things, we accomplished a number of major goals:

• We partnered with vLex to build a complete and reliable case law database. With their support, we've added millions of opinions to CourtListener from over 3,000 jurisdictions. We now have nearly 10 million citations in our database, and we're just getting started.

• We are working with the Supreme Court of Maine so they can upload their decisions directly into CourtListener each day.

• We created and published over a million judge-written case summaries.

• We launched @recap.email, our system for automatically adding ECF notifications to RECAP and firm CMSs. This is a powerful new way to contribute documents to the RECAP Archive that we'll be promoting in the new year.

• We launched webhooks, a system to pipe PACER data, alerts, and more directly into your servers.

• In the next few days, we'll be releasing appellate court support for the RECAP extension — A goal we've had for many years.

• We worked with Pre/Dicta to add thousands of judges in Texas, New York, and California to our database.

• And finally, we moved to the cloud, so that everything we do is scalable, secure, and reliable. Thanks to this, in 2022 we were able to serve nearly 200 million downloads and send 1.3 million emails to our users.

At the beginning of 2022, we set a number of goals. We didn't hit them all, but we made huge progress towards nearly all of them.

Looking forward to 2023

Next year is going to be another big one and with enough help, we will thrive.

We have many goals for 2023:

• We will continue expanding and enhancing our database of opinions, with the aim of it being reliable and complete in 2024.

• We will launch a collection of services for working with PACER data, called the RECAP Suite.

• We will continue our many policy efforts, including bringing FOIA to the judiciary and pushing to make PACER free.

• We will convert our massive collection of oral arguments to text. This is enabled by recent advances in AI and machine learning that have finally made this kind of conversion affordable. This will make our oral argument files readable, searchable, and alertable, and will open the recordings up to the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.

• We will seek a partnership with a court to build an open source docketing system. This first-of-its-kind system will be open, searchable, and usable by default. This initiative aims to stop for-profit companies from putting paywalls around our democracy.

• We will make bad redaction detectors for Clio and other document filing systems, so that we can root out bad redactions before they are filed with the courts.

• We will finish re-launching the Big Cases bot on Mastodon and Twitter.

• We will add search alerts for PACER filings, so you can be notified when search terms appear in federal filings.

• We will begin highlighting case law citations in federal filings, and we will link them to the correct opinions.

• We will continue expanding and maintaining our database of financial disclosures.

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 2023, 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. Thank you.

Thank You

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

Y’all know who you are and the amazing things you do. Thank you all for your generous support this and every year.