Legal Software: PACER says large numbers of U.S. federal court documents are no longer available in its databases

marți, 26 august 2014

PACER says large numbers of U.S. federal court documents are no longer available in its databases

PACER, the fee-based information service for the U.S. federal courts, announced recently that large numbers of court documents are no longer in its databases, as of August 10, 2014.

Journalist John Hawkinson, citing a source at the Second Circuit, said yesterday that the reason was a “system integration issue — didn’t prioritize backwards compatibility”.

Here is the text of the announcement, on the PACER Website:

As of August 10, 2014 the following information will no longer be available on PACER:

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 CM/ECF conversion

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

For further information please contact the court directly. Contact information for each court is available on the Court Locator page.

HT @adamliptak

Filed under: Applications, Data sets, Policy debates, Technology developments Tagged: Loss of public access to legal information, Missing legal data, PACER, Public access to legal information