Beyond Court DecisionsâDockets, Documents, and Analytics, 0517 COBJ, Vol. 46 No. 5 Pg. 59
| Author | Jan Bissett , Margi Heinen, J. |
Legal Research Corner
Jan Bissett , Margi Heinen, J.
Beyond Court Decisions-Dockets, Documents, and Analytics
In the early days of computerized legal research, Lexis and Westlaw provided searchable official court decisions, either full-text or via proprietary headnotes. It was a big leap to search precedential decisions text without relying on indexes and digests. As courts implemented websites and electronic filing legal researchers began to retrieve decisions directly from those courts. Electronic availability of court dockets and pleadings gave way to searchable access-and legal researchers have not looked back, expecting more of this information in their everyday work lives.
The Legal Research Corner last examined how court documents are used in legal research in Linda Fields’s 2004 article, “Using Docket and E-Filing Retrieval Systems for Legal Research.”[1] In her article, Fields discussed various state and federal court e-filing systems that provide access to dockets and documents. Since 2004, many changes, including new products and vendors, as well as the ability to manipulate data with the use of analytics, have increased legal researchers’ expectations. This article does not review or recommend specific products but rather provides information on caveats, options, and trends in docket, document, and case analytics research.
There are many reasons for conducting such research. Attorneys creating a specific pleading for the first time may want to examine several examples from their jurisdiction. Researchers may want to see the “back story” documents for cases grabbing the headlines. Others may want to find analytics for the judge in their cases, such as how long a case lingers in his or her court, how likely the judge is to rule positively on summary judgment motions, and whether the judge tends to favor one point of view And the traditional uses of docket monitoring for business and client development, as well as case monitoring and tracking, still hold sway.
How do researchers go about finding the dockets and documents necessary for these legal research tasks? Some law libraries provide research guides on docket searching and usefulness (e.g., Yale,[2] Vanderbilt,[3] and Boston College[4] provide such guides for their students and legal researchers). Other law school libraries provide a short section on dockets within descriptions of jurisdictions (e.g., see Harvard’s description of California materials[5]). Many firm libraries provide access to specialty tools to accommodate researchers’ needs.
Caveats
As with most legal research projects, the devil is in the details, and some of these details should be anticipated before the research begins. Specifically, researchers may want to consider issues of jurisdiction, vendors, and time frame. For example, federal electronic court pleadings are more widely available than those of state courts, and court autonomy within states can result in vast differences in availability between courts in different counties or districts. One of the factors that may influence state availability is vendor related; some courts contract with private vendors, while others have governmental technology units creating databases for court documents. Finally, researchers may have to resort to archive requests for older material. Electronic court documents initially became available in the mid-1990s or later, and documents filed with courts before that time are not usually electronically accessible.
Traditional Resources
Many of the products familiar to researchers—PACER, Bloomberg Law, Courtlink, Lexis, and Westlaw—provide docket and court document access and retrieval, along with some level of searching.
PACER
The federal court docket and document retrieval system was described in the Fields article and is still a heavily used platform for locating federal dockets and documents. It continues to be a reasonable price, although several lawsuits have been filed in federal courts disputing PACER charges and pricing, including a class action in a district court[6] and a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.[7] Nonetheless, PACER is a one-stop location for federal appeals, district court, and bankruptcy court dockets and documents. With the exception of sealed or...
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