Just published by the American Bar Association, "Internet Legal Research on a Budget: Free and Low-Cost Resources for Lawyers, Second Edition" by Judy Davis and Carole Levitt directs lawyers to useful and reliable databases and explains how to use them effectively. This edition has updated information about resources discussed in the first edition, new resources and expanded chapters on Casemaker and Fastcase.

With cost-conscious clients scrutinizing legal bills, lawyers cannot afford to depend on expensive legal research databases, especially when reliable free resources are available. This updated edition of "Internet Legal Research on a Budget" will help you quickly find the best free or low-cost resources online and use them for your research needs. The authors share the top websites, apps, blogs, and other Internet resources that will save you time, money, and frustration during the legal research process.

This book will help you locate and use:

• Legal portals and directories (government, academic, and commercial);
• Case law databases (government and commercial);
• Federal Statutory research;
• Federal, legislative, and congressional materials;
• Starting points for state, local, territorial, and tribal law;
• Foreign, international, and comparative law resources;
• And more!

Davis, JD, MLIS, is a senior law librarian and adjunct assistant professor of law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has practiced law in California and currently teaches legal research to USC law students, works in the law library’s Reference department, and gives lectures and training sessions on legal research and related topics.

Levitt, JD, MLS, is the founder and President of Internet for Lawyers (www.netforlawyers.com) and Vice-President of CLEwebinars.com. She practiced law in California and was a law librarian in Chicago and Los Angeles. She is a nationally recognized CLE seminar speaker and bestselling Law Practice Division author. She is an expert on Internet investigative and legal research.

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The Federal Courts' docket database PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is increasing the amount of free searches/documents users can access before generating a bill.

In it's October 2019 quarterly newsletter, PACER announced that:

"Beginning Jan. 1, 2020, if a PACER user quarterly usage is $30 or less, the bill will be waived. This is an increase from the existing $15 or less quarterly fee waiver. Users will see this reflected in the April 2020 billing statement. This will result in more than 75 percent of users accessing court records paying no fee in a given quarter. The Judicial Conference approved this action at their September 17, 2019, meeting."

The post PACER Increases Amount Users Can Search/Download Before Generating a Bill appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Currently, Big Case Bot is following and posting documents from:

• Nat'l Inst. of Family and Life v. Becerra
• Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels v. Donald J. Trump aka David Dennison
• ACLU v. Madison County, Miss.

among other now-current trials.

In its documentation, the bot is described as follows:

The bot uses PACER RSS feeds to gather the latest filings from 74 U.S. District Courts and five federal courts of appeals and stores the docket entries in a database. It matches new filings against a preselected list of major cases, scrapes matching documents from PACER, uploads them to a DocumentCloud project and posts the results on Twitter.

Note that some federal district courts -- including those in the Eastern District of Virginia, the District of Maryland and the District of Hawaii -- have elected not to publish an RSS feed from their dockets. As a result, Big Cases can't follow cases in those districts. Most federal courts of appeal also do not pulbish [sic] RSS feeds of new docket entries.

Big Case Bot was created by USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath. In his Twitter bio, Heath descibes himself as, "covering law and justice. Data, documents and 'convoluted KGB style back-door' stuff." The bot utilizes the Python programming language.

Anyone can download and customize the code (using their own PACER and other login credentials) to download documents based on parameters they set. Note that according to the bot's documentation, the Big Case Bot code, "has only been tested on a machine running CentOS Linux 7."

The post Twitter Bot Follows Federal Cases of Note; Posts Free Case Documents appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Dockets for the following courts (previously removed) have been restored to the PACER system.

• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Dockets for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California have not yet been restored. The PACER Web site indicates that "Work to restore access for the Central District of California Bankruptcy Court continues and electronic access should be available before the end of the year."

At the time of the dockets' removal, the AOC explained that the dockets were removed because the systems used by those courts were not compatible with the new NextGen system being implemented by PACER.

The post Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) Returns Most Documents Removed from PACER appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Clicking the Filter Results button opens a pop-up box that allows you to further filter your results by numerous criteria (e.g., Court Type, Court, Year Filed in the screenshot above). Clicking the plus sign next to any of the listed filters expands that filter to show the narrower filtering options

While many of the filter options seem to be the same as the column labels that we have been able to use for sorting for the past few years, one seems unique - the Party Role filter. Even though my test searches were by Party Name, it turns out the results also included attorney names. To see only party names in your results list, you can click the Filter Result tab, then click on the + sign to the left of the Party Role label (it will change to a minus sign), and then choose pla (plaintiff), dft (defendant), intv (intervenor). To see only attorney names in your results list, choose aty.

(Note that the Party Role filter does not appear for every search. In fact, the Party Role filter may be a limited test that PACER is conducting because I did not see that filter on the list that appeared in the pop-up box for any subsequent test searches.)

Who else has seen this filter?

The post Is PACER Testing New Filters in its Case Locator Search Results appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

"The Administrative Office is working to restore electronic access to these cases by converting the docket sheets in these cases to PDF format which will allow us to make them available in PACER. This process will be completed in the four appellate courts by the end of October.  We are also working to provide a similar solution for the dockets on the legacy system in the California Central bankruptcy court."

It's important to note that the statement refers only to restoring PDFs of the docket sheets for these courts/time frames and not the underlying documents from those cases. Addressing that issue in the same blog post, Sellers reportedly told the Washington Post that "the vast majority of the records consist of docket sheets rather than actual court documents."

On August 11, the AOC announced that select documents from five courts would no longer be available in the PACER Case Locator. The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL),  Special Libraries Association (SLA) and individual law librarian bloggers have been vocal critics of the changes.

Previously, the Washington Post had reported that Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the  Judiciary Committee contacted the AOC, urging the courts to restore online access to the documents that had been removed.

The post Documents Removed from PACER Set to Return Says Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Changes to the PACER system stemming from the announcment, include:

• Allow[ing] courts, at the discretion of the presiding judge, to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available online to the public through PACER, for $2.40 per audio file.
• Adjust[ing] the Electronic Public Access fee schedule so that users are not billed unless they accrue charges of more than $10 of PACER usage in a quarterly billing cycle, in effect quadrupling the amount of data available without charge.
• Approv[ing] a pilot in up to 12 courts to publish federal district and bankruptcy court opinions via the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) so members of the public can more easily search across opinions and across courts.

Previously:

• digital audio recordings of court hearings were available to the public by ordering a CD for $26.00 per audio file.
• PACER users were not billed unless their accounts totaled at least $10 in a one-year period.

For step-by-step details on utilizing and searching FDsys, PACER and its US Party/Case Index see The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet.

Also buried in the press release is news that a "new version of the [US Party/Case Index] search tool, which includes additional search capabilities and result formats, has been developed and will be deployed under the new name PACER Case Locator this month." There is no indication if this new PACER Case Locator will encompass all courts with a unified search, or continue the holes in coverage of the existing US Party/Case Index.

The Judicial Conference is the policy-making body for the federal court system. The Chief Justice serves as its presiding officer. It is comprised of the chief judges of the 13 courts of appeals, a district judge from each of the 12 geographic circuits, and the chief judge of the Court of International Trade. The Conference meets twice a year to consider administrative and policy issues affecting the court system, and to make recommendations to Congress concerning legislation involving the Judicial Branch.

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