Our 2024 Director's Letter

Free Law Project is the leading non-profit using advocacy, technology, and data to improve the legal system. Today we are asking for your support so that 2025 can be the best year ever for RECAP, CourtListener, and all we do.

Read on to learn more about what we have been up to or click below to give us your support. Thank you.

FLP's Year in Review

When I write this letter each year, I have the immense pleasure of looking back at all of our accomplishments and tallying them up. Without fail, I am astounded at how the day-to-day work snowballs into a long list of successes. Our mantra around here is to play the long game, and in 2024, a number of our big bets either paid off or were set into motion.

Among them:

1. A new search engine

   We spent two years revamping our search engine, leading to a new one for case law in January and a new search engine for RECAP in November.

   CourtListener now gets about three million queries per month.

2. Better RECAP

   We overhauled RECAP and made it work on every major browser including Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome. If you use PACER, install RECAP!

3. eFiling system

   We launched an ambitious new project to build software for courts. The goal is to make a better system for both filers and courts. This is a long play to make a huge impact in the years to come, and we are now looking for court partners to get things going.

   If you work at a forward-thinking court that might be interested in joining this project — or if you know of such a court — please get in touch.

4. Branding and swag!

   We finally overhauled our logos and launched a new store with lots of great Free Law Project, CourtListener, and Bots.law swag.

5. Improved case law

   We continued enhancing our database of case law, incorporating all the Harvard Case Law data, while making millions of enhancements.

6. Enhanced APIs

   We launched a new API for fighting hallucinations and upgraded our APIs with a wide swath of improvements.

7. Conferences

   We presented at numerous conferences including NICAR (three presentations!), LitCon, AALL, LSC ITC, and eCourts.

8. Memberships

   And finally, we launched memberships for our biggest supporters.

But of all these accomplishments, what really stands out is how we have grown as an organization. We've been adding team members like crazy, so that we can do our best work, and so we can do more of it. We grew our board of directors, and now have a talented team guiding, fundraising, researching, and developing our many systems.

Looking forward to 2025, we are focused on the following goals:

1. Case Law

   Our case law is widely used, but it is imperfect. We've made huge strides building this data set over the past 15 years, and 2025 is the year to finish it.

   We'll do that by launching a scanning initiative and focusing on fixing data quality and display issues.

2. AI

   Artificial intelligence is a huge deal in the legal sector, and we will be working hard to build open and responsible AI solutions for our users and clients. This will mean a citator, summarization, categorization, semantic search, and enhancements to our oral argument audio files.

3. Alerts

   In 2024, we sent over 2.5 million emails to our users. We're going to build on this. We'll launch an alert system for RECAP, enhance our docket alerts, and more. This will be exciting and impactful.

4. CourtListener will look good!

   Until now, we have not had a designer for CourtListener, and, well, we know it shows. Our new branding was the first step. Now it is time to build a new website that is faster and easier to use.

5. Search

   Search is at the core of CourtListener, and we will be making it a lot better in the coming year. We'll add query defaults, search history, auto-complete, better relevancy, and a bunch more.

Whew, that is a lot, and that is not even everything. Our full plan lists about 30 features we will launch, big and small.

It's going to be an incredible year.

Please Support Our Work

All the achievements and initiatives above take considerable effort, and we do it with pride to create a more open, capable, and innovative judicial system. In 2025, with your support, we will do more than ever before.

If you have benefited from our work this year or if you share our vision of a better legal sector, 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. You are the fuel to our fire.

The FLP Index

If the above does not impress you yet, I will close this letter with a few fun statistics that highlight the scope and impact of our work.

First, a few basics:

509 million — the number of records in the RECAP Archive

2.5 million — the number of emails we sent in 2024

10 million — the number of decisions in our database of case law

40,000 — our daily visitor count

RECAP is our biggest collection, but it is hard to put that into context. Just how big is RECAP?

151 million — the number of PDF pages we have in RECAP

1.6 billion inches — the circumference of Earth at the equator

1.7 billion inches — the length of RECAP if you printed it and put it end to end

29,031 feet — The height of Mount Everest

51,591 feet — the height of the RECAP Archive if printed and stacked

RECAP can circle the Earth and is more than 1.5 times taller than Everest.