PACER for Free?

A bill currently before the House of Representatives, Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018, H.R. 6714, 115th Cong. (2018), proposes that the Case Management / Electronic Case Files system for the federal courts be consolidated, and states be given the option of participating in the new system.

The bill introduced by Representative Doug Collins of Georgia would make filings on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system available to the public free of charge at least five days after they were filed. The bill also requires that all documents be text searchable and 'machine readable'. The provision for machine readable documents apparently contemplates court filings being in the XML, HTML, or JSON formats which a browser or software can analyze and prepare tables of content or outlines from.

The bill would also allow external web sites to link directly to PACER filings. Would this allow for links to PACER filings to be added more easily than it currently possible with LinkBuilder? See the Tip of the Night for December 1, 2016.

Audio and visual filing are also to be posted to the new system, and "]t]he system shall provide search functions for public use". Hopefully in the future we'll have the option to run Boolean searches across all documents filed with the federal courts.

New E-Filing Rules for the New York State Appellate Division

This year, the new Electronic Filing Rules adopted by the Departments of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Divisions became effective. E-filing for the Appellate Division will take place using the New York State Courts Electronic Filing System, also used by the Supreme Court. See: www.nycourts.gov/efile. (The Court of Appeals uses the Court-PASS system.) Appendix A to the new rules lists technical requirements for the filings:

1. Text searchable PDF/A format.

2. Bookmarks linking sections listed on the table of contents to the corresponding pages.

3. Motion papers must be combined in a single PDF with bookmarks linking to each successive document.

4. Each volume of an appellate appendix must be filed separately.

5. No single PDF can be more than 100 MB.

In addition the rules specify that, "The 'initial view' of a PDF shall be the Bookmarks Panel and Page." This is a clear reference to a setting in Adobe Acrobat which can be found under File . . . Properties, and is not present in Adobe Reader. Click on the 'Initial View' tab and select 'Bookmarks and Panel and Page' in the navigation tab drop down menu.

PACER File Size Limits

Filings on PACER are limited by the file size of PDFs, and sometimes by the number of pages. The tricky thing is the limit on the number of bytes for a single upload differs between the federal district, bankruptcy, and circuit courts. If you've got a single PDF which is more than 10.1 MBs that you're filing with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, you'll need to divide it into separate PDFs.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts provides an index listing the maximum file size for each court, entitled, "CM/ECF PDF FILE SIZE LIMITS". The allowable limits range from a minuscule 3 MB for the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California and the Northern Mariana Islands, to 200 MB for the Bankruptcy Courts for the Western District of Pennsylvania; the Eastern District of Texas; and the Eastern District of Wisconsin. A limit of an astounding 39933288 KB (39 GB) is listed for the Third Circuit, but this is an error. The actual limit is 50 MB. The median file size limit for all federal courts is 30.5 MB.