Electronic Access to Bankruptcy Courts Boon to Public

Enron and WorldCom, two of the largest bankruptcy cases in American history, are pending before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. What else do they have in common? Both were filed on a Sunday, when the courthouse doors were locked.

"We’ve been totally electronic since March of 2001," explained Kathleen Farrell, clerk of the bankruptcy court. "That allows our 4,500 registered users to file whenever and from wherever they want."

And with the help of PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), anyone with Internet access can see just what court records those two high-profile cases and any other bankruptcy filings in Farrell’s court have generated.

Interest in Enron and WorldCom case documents has been extraordinary, PACER records show. In the first few weeks after the WorldCom filing in July, PACER users collectively retrieved 162,223 pages of court documents connected to the case.

In the seven months since the Enron bankruptcy case was filed, PACER users have downloaded an aggregate 6.7 million pages of its documents—retrieving more than a million pages per month in January, February, March, and April.

"Too early to tell," said Ted Willmann, manager of the San Antonio-based PACER Service Center, when asked if WorldCom will generate as much interest as Enron. Willmann reports that bankruptcy courts nationwide are generating about 16 million pages worth of usage every month—about 70 percent of all PACER usage.

"The two biggest jumps in PACER usage are attributed to switching from a dial-up system to an Internet-based system and providing more documents online," said Michael Greenwood, a member of the Office of Information Technology staff in the Administrative Office who helped develop the PACER system. Farrell said technological changes in case management have played a part in increased PACER usage at her court.

PACER users are required to obtain an account number and are billed quarterly. The fee for PACER, a service of the federal Judiciary, is 7 cents per page, with a limit of $2.10 for any one document, no matter its page length. No fees are owed until a user accrues more than $10 in a calendar year.

Congress has required the Judiciary to charge a fee for PACER service, but the Judiciary has taken steps to ensure that user costs are as low as possible.

"Federal rules require accepting all filings, even those on paper from pro se filers, especially in Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases," Farrell said. "But those paper files are scanned in and electronically administered by our staff. Regardless of how we get the information, it will become part of our CM/ECF operation."

Case management/electronic case files (CM/ECF) systems are now in use in more than one-third of the 90 federal bankruptcy courts. CM/ECF not only replaces the courts’ aging electronic docketing and case management systems, but also provides the option to have case file documents in electronic format and to accept filings over the Internet.

"We strongly encourage attorneys to participate in electronic filing," Farrell said. "Once they find out how easy it is, any resistance diminishes."

Two incentives for participating lawyers are the speedy electronic notice whenever a document is filed in their case and free, one-time electronic access to those documents. Lawyers who file cases in the Southern District of New York Bankruptcy Court also can pay the required filing fees over the Internet.

Electronic filing has transformed the work of a bankruptcy court clerk’s office. "My staff’s desks are not swamped with piles of paper anymore but our people are more actively involved in quality control," Farrell said. "Quality control is paramount to what we’re doing."

The amount of office space needed for storage of paper files has greatly decreased, as has the number of courthouse visitors who want to search through paper case files.

Electronic filing does not necessarily have to change a bankruptcy judge’s work, but Farrell reports that "our judges are using it more and more."

"They now can access cases from home. They don’t have to lug heavy court documents back and forth. They can use shared drives with their law clerks for writing opinions ... I can’t imagine how we’d be handling the crush of these cases if we were not using electronic case management," she said.

PACER fees pay for the development of CM/ECF, and the expanded electronic access the new system offers has proved a boon to users of the PACER service. In the early 1990s, PACER had a few thousand users. By the mid-90s, when PACER access still largely was limited to docket information such as case title and attorneys of record, the number of users had climbed to about 30,000.

Today, there are 187,000 active PACER accounts. Willmann says the top 10 accounts, most of them companies in the data collection and resale business, represent about 20 percent of all usage. The top 100 users provide about 30 percent of PACER business.

"We have a very small number of users that use the system a lot," Willmann said.

Top Five Courts for PACER Usage (Totals are approximate number of pages per month) 1. Delaware Bankuptcy Court - more than 2 million 2. New York Southern Bankruptcy Court - just under 2 million* 3. Illinois Northern Bankruptcy Court - 1.2 million 4. California Central Bankruptcy COurt - just under 1 million 5. Texas Southern Consolidated (both District and Bankruptcy) - 800,000 * Average monthly total before Worldcom Bankruptcy case was filled