Oregon Legal Research Blog
Major hat tips to the law librarian community for these updates!
If you want to vent, here are some who got there before you (as of this morning, 8/27/14):
1) US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off: Ars technica article
2) ”The federal judiciary this month removed years of court records from its online archives, drawing concern from attorneys, journalists, researchers and open-record advocates who rely on remote access to files.
Court files that are no longer available on PACER include cases from the U.S. courts of appeals for the Second, Seventh, Eleventh and Federal circuits. Details about the cases that were removed are here.
Want to access a case filed in the Second Circuit before Jan. 1, 2010? You now must send an email or written request to the court clerks office to obtain the records. The cost: $30 for the entire file, which will be sent by email. (PACER costs are 10 cents per page. Opinions, however, are free.)
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts released a statement Tuesday that said a change was made to the PACER architecture to prepare for the implementation of the Next Generation of the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files System. NextGen replaces the older CM/ECF system and provides improvements for users, including a single sign-on for PACER and NextGen.
“As a result of these architectural changes, the locally developed legacy case management systems in four courts of appeal and one bankruptcy court are now incompatible with PACER, and therefore the judiciary is no longer able to provide electronic access to the closed cases on those systems,” the Administrative Office statement said. “The dockets and documents in these cases can be obtained directly from the relevant court.””
3) Read more, National Law Journal article: Read more: “PACER Changes Draw Ire of Attorneys, Journalists,” by Todd Ruger, Legal Times, August 26, 2014 (Google national law journal pacer if that link doesn’t work for you.)
4) “[S]ome filings no longer on PACER are still available via Bloomberg Law. Select others are available on Westlaw…. Based on my testing this morning on Bloomberg Law, you can no longer update dockets for matters removed from PACER without a courier dispatch. And you can not get docket documents that have never been viewed (the green hyperlinks for those of you familiar with Bloomberg Law) without a courier dispatch. But for items that have been accessed before (the blue hyperlinks), the PDF of the file remains.”