Finding SCOTUS Filings

Anyone who has worked in the legal field for even a short time Has learned to lookup filings in federal court cases on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). There are individual PACER sites for all of the appellate circuit courts, federal district courts, and the federal bankruptcy courts. The link on the PACER court sites page to the Supreme Court of the United States, simply takes you to the home page of SCOTUS, not the individual CM/ECF Filer / PACER Login pages for each of the federal courts of original jurisdiction, and court of intermediate appeal.

If you look around on the SCOTUS home page, you'll see a link to 'Case Documents' at the top. Click there, and you'll get an menu with several options. The option for 'Docket Search' will take you to a page where you can look up case numbers. However you'll only get a list of filings and basic case information - you will not get links to the actual filings made with the Supreme Court.

The option you do want in the menu is for 'On- Line MERITS BRIEFS', which will lead you to the web page on the site of the American Bar Association, which posts links to individual case pages from which you can download filings with SCOTUS.

Auto-Link Case and Statute Citations

If your firm uses Lexis, there is an easy to link to cases and statutes cited in a brief. The Shepard’s BriefLink tool is available on the Lexis Advance site. It works very well and is easy to use. You just go to the Lexis Advance Research menu, select ‘Shepard’s BriefLink’ and upload your Word document. There really isn’t much to it. It runs through the brief quickly. I did notice that it messed up a link to the New York CPLR (Civil Practice Law and Rules) in the TOA of the sample brief I used, but this can be easily corrected.

Some courts are considering making it mandatory to include hyperlinks to each cited case and statute in any filed brief. This tool also saves paralegals the trouble of having to look up citations one by one when cite checking a brief.

LinkBuilder

The United States District Courts have done legal professionals everywhere a favor by developing an add-in for MS Word called LinkBuilder. LinkBuilder will automatically insert hyperlinks to court filings available on PACER. See this guide posted to the site of the District of Nebraska. When you open the PDF, you'll see that there is a Word template embedded in the file - 'LinkBuilder.dotm'. The guide shows you how to save this file in the startup folder for Word. It will appear as a new tab on your Word ribbon.

I tested it just now and it seems to worked fine. When you click on 'Insert CM/ECF Links' t searches through a Word document for one of these abbreviations:

Filing no. 1

Filing 1

Docket no. 1

Doc. #1

Doc. 1

ECF No. 1

ECF 1

. . . and will then automatically link the PACER filing to the reference. It’s doesn’t work for ex parte filings, filings under seal, or minute entries.

The add-in prompts you to select a district court, and choose one of the seven citation formats. Note that not all district courts have the LinkBuilder report option installed. If they do, you want to use it and select the option to 'paste data from from CM/ECF report' since you won't incur any charges on your PACER account with this method.

You are directed to login to PACER, click on Reports in the 'title bar' menu, and then click on Link Builder.

[Oddlly even though this guide is posted to the site of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, that court does not seem to have the LinkBuilder option. The District of Utah does however. After searching by a case number you should find code like this: [I am somewhat suspicious that such code is not available for all cases - even those filed since LinkBuilder was introduced (2013?).

Copy and paste the code as prompted by the add-in.

If the District Court does not have the LinkBuilder report option, you can choose the last option to pull data from the Docket Sheet, but you will be charged. I have tested out this last option and it works just fine for the Southern District of New York.