Thursday 28 August 2014

PACER news

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has cause an uproar with the recent announcement that many previously available dockets in the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system are no longer available electronically. This is due to an upcoming upgrade in the electronic file management system that they are using - according to the announcement, "the locally developed legacy case management systems in the five courts listed below are now incompatible with PACER; therefore, the judiciary is no longer able to provide electronic access to the closed cases on those systems." No longer available are: 
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2008
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Cases filed prior to March 1, 2012
U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California: Cases filed prior to May 1, 2001
Stosh Jonjak, a Pittsburgh law librarian at Reed Smith, has blogged about the news and included links to the major news reports on the topic.  Ars Technica, in a scathing article titled "US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off", points out that the dockets were removed without any warning, and the announcement came afterwards.
The American Assn. of Law Libraries is monitoring the developments and is considering a more detailed response to the AOC (comments from members to the Govt. Relations Office are welcomed).
Meanwhile, some of the dockets are available from Bloomberg Law, depending on whether they were ever requested by a Bloomberg account holder.  The same is true for Lexis and Westlaw.

No comments: