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.