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We have been emphasizing PACER as a primary Federal docket resource for just over a year now. This was a change from placing commercial options ahead of the official one. It is part of a complicated set of docket tools that we are making available and was a bit of an unknown, as we spotlighted it as a replacement for docket work faculty were doing within Bloomberg, which we cancelled. It has worked out better than I could have anticipated.
The thing about docketing resources is that, if your researchers are primarily just pulling documents, we are awash in good docket options. At the U.S. Federal level, there doesn’t seem to be a convincing need for a commercial option. Free Law Project’s Courtlistener is an ideal first stop for a lot of documents. It has been rare that I have read about a Federal case and not been able to find a free copy of the relevant document on Courtlistener.
I’m a relatively new research and writing instructor so this approach will not be news to many of you. But I would grab a pleading or a decision that I saw in the news and bring it in to class: are Taylor Swift’s texts going to be included in Lively v. Baldoni? Why did the court punt the $10 Billion Trump complaint and how execrable was the writing? Courtlistener was a great place to grab law that was in the news.
This was great because (a) it doesn’t require a login and (b) it comes with no direct cost. I was frequently watching the news during legal research and writing and, as unprofessional and low-quality pleadings were filed or courts provided analysis of those documents, I could grab a copy to discuss in class. On the very rare occasion that I needed a document that was not there, I could access my PACER account and use RECAP to add it for the community.
We are using PACER group billing. This foxes some of our folks because it is not a centralized system, just a centralized payment option. Faculty need to create their own, personal PACER accounts. This actually works great because as faculty join or leave the organization, they can carry that account with them. All I need to do as the billing account administrator is to bring their personal PACER account under our billing umbrella and remove it when they leave.
I am going to be getting students to start up their PACER account during 1L, which is not something I had really considered when I was starting at the law school. But they may as well as start seeing how it works and be prepared, in case they join an organization where it is needed, with an existing account. There is no cost for anyone to create their personal PACER account and the payment method step is optional and can be skipped. So no one (faculty, students, self-represented parties) need to expose more about themselves than necessary.
This is especially true because of the new price increase on PACER that starts on January 1, 2027. I was a bit worried about our researchers hitting the $30 per quarter free threshold. As long as all of our researchers stayed below that, our bill would be zero. That has not happened, but the overage has been manageable. Starting in 2027, however, the quarterly free allowance is going up to $40 so it will provide us with even more insulation from research overages. If our researchers are given a bit of education to keep themselves under 333 pages (new page charge is $0.12, up from $0.10) per quarter, and to use Courtlistener first before initiating their own cost, I would expect our costs to decrease further, perhaps to $500 or so.
We were facing a license costing almost $90,000 when we cancelled Bloomberg. With that in mind, I had a lot of margin to pay for docketing if we needed to. While that amount provided access to a lot of other information, we weren’t using it. Functionally, I was primarily facing dropping Bloomberg and its docket support and having a new docket cost.
Our PACER costs have been substantially lower. I budgeted about $2,000 for the first year, because that aligned with the actual docket usage we were seeing in Bloomberg. In the end, our usage has been well below that, with the overage being:
- 2026 Q1: $186.00
- 2026 Q2: $175.00
- 2026 Q3: $176.20
- 2026 Q4: $130.20
Our billing group umbrella shelters about a dozen faculty (although all faculty have been invited to participate), or about 20% of our faculty. $667 / year is a completely manageable outlay for supplemental docket research. We are currently not including student PACER accounts nor those of adjuncts, who may use their accounts both for teaching and for their own practice. I could see adding students in key courses, like a moot court program or student publication, but that isn’t a bridge we’ve had to cross yet.
I say supplemental because we are also providing docket access through Lexis Courtlink and Westlaw’s dockets. They are subsumed within the standard content collections from those suppliers. As we start to provide more advanced legal research training in our 1L classes, this layered docket option will be easy to showcase.
We have picked up a commercial state docketing solution but it is intentionally localized. We have 5 seats of Clio vLex DocketAlarm for faculty who have specific scholarlship requirements for doing state docket research that can’t be done in the larger commercial licenses. The annual license is a bit more than we have budgeted for PACER annually. We are also investigating a Unicourt license for Dart and Deep, again strictly for empirical scholarship and only for one or two users.
It has been funny to me how each of these vendors—Bloomberg, Clio, Unicourt—pitch the community-oriented aggregation as a plus and original idea. It is as if Free Law’s RECAP hadn’t blazed that trail for free, public access. Someone who subscribes to the vendor and who then downloads a docket object and pays for it will see it added to the vendor’s collection of documents, not the public collection.
This is great if you think that paying a license fee AND a download fee (PACER costs are often not included in the vendor license) to add a document that the vendor can then resell to others creates value for your organization. I don’t see it. The reason I support it for RECAP is because I know the public community gets the benefit of the investment. If you drop your license with a commercial vendor, you no longer maintain access to those contributed PDFs unless you kept your own copy, even while the vendor gets to resell them.
As a rule, I think researchers who use PACER should use it outside of a commercial provider and use RECAP to ensure that they are saving it out to the Free Law Project’s Courtlistener. Let the commercial providers license Courtlistener API access. That money flow would help everyone, rather than researchers building out extractive legal publishers’s collections.
I find that docket research offerings are a challenge. They have relatively limited utility from what I can tell unless you are able to use them for market research. In an academic environment, where few students and probably fewer faculty use them, the limited utility is probably financially manageable using free or already-paid for platform licenses.
I don’t really see the opportunity for a heftier docket option without a revenue offset. If I was a a law firm, for example, and able to generate business based on the more rigorous data extraction options some docket providers feature, it would make sense. In a cost-neutral or cost-loss space, there is no obvious value return to the organization to pay for that extra access.