PACER Arrives On the Net

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) has come to the Internet. Once accessible only by a modem and dialing directly to the PACER system, selected court systems now may be reached just like other websites.

To access, visit the Judiciary’s website at www.uscourts.gov, click on What’s New, and you’ll come to the link to Electronic Public Access. Click again, and you’re at the PACER Service Center on the Internet. PACER is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts, and from the U.S. Party/Case Index. Presently seven bankruptcy and district courts are on the web with PACER, but over the next few months more than 90 sites are expected to be added.

Using PACER—either dial-in or on the Internet—is fast and simple, and anyone with a PC can use it. The system is available days, nights, and weekends. The case information it provides is comprehensive. Updates to active and recently closed cases can be confirmed in seconds. And from now until October 1, while PACER on the Internet is in its “shake-out” stage, access is free. However, beginning October 1, a user fee of $.07 a page will be charged. Charges for registered user access over the dial-in PACER system remain $.60 per minute.

With its electronic access to case dockets, the PACER System can retrieve such information as a listing of parties and participants including judges, attorneys, and trustees involved in a case; case-related information such as cause of action, nature of suit, and dollar demand; a chronology of dates of case events entered in the case record; judgments or case status; or a listing of new cases each day in the bankruptcy court.

“The ease of access to our records—particularly when the documents themselves are available—will fundamentally change the way we relate to the bar and public, and the way in which we internally do our work. In my own court, we have had imaged documents available on the Internet for the last six months. In that period of time, our website has had almost 500,000 hits, and the once daily phone calls from large institutional investors have virtually ceased.”

Providing PACER on the web wasn’t simply a matter of opening up a new website. Each court maintains its own database with case information. To move to the web, telephone lines and routers have to be installed and the PACER software must be converted to web technology.

The U.S. Party/Case Index, a national locator for U.S. district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts, is not presently available on the Internet, but is expected to be added in the not too distant future.