Assessing PACER's Access Barriers

The U.S. Courts recently conducted a year-long assessment of their Electronic Public Access program which included a survey of PACER users. While the results of the assessment haven’t been formally published, the Third Branch Newsletter has an interview with Bankruptcy Judge J. Rich Leonard that discusses a few high-level findings of the survey. Judge Leonard has been heavily involved in shaping the evolution of PACER since its inception twenty years ago and continues to lead today.

The survey covered a wide range of PACER users—“the courts, the media, litigants, attorneys, researchers, and bulk data collectors”—and Judge Leonard claims they found “a remarkably high level of satisfaction”: around 80% of those surveyed were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the service.

If we compare public access before we had PACER to where we are now, there is clearly much success to celebrate. But the key question is not only whether current users are satisfied with the service but also whether PACER is reaching its entire audience of potential users. Are there artificial obstacles preventing potential PACER users—who admittedly would be difficult to poll—from using the service? The satisfaction statistic may be fine at face value, assuming that a representative sample of users were polled, but it could be misleading if it’s being used to gauge the overall success of PACER as a public access system.

One indicator of obstacles may be another statistic cited by Judge Leonard: “about 45% of PACER users also use CM/ECF,” the Courts’ electronic case management and filing system. To put it another way, nearly half of all PACER users are currently attorneys who practice federal law.

That number seems inordinately high to me and suggests that significant barriers to public access may exist. In particular, account registration requires all users to submit a valid credit card for billing (or alternatively a valid home address to receive log-in credentials and billing statements by mail.) Even if users’ credit cards are never charged, this registration hurdle may already turn away many potential PACER users at the door.

The other barrier is obviously the cost itself. With a few exceptions, users are forced to pay a fee for each document they download, at a metered rate of eight-cents per page. Judge Leonard asserts that “surprisingly, cost ranked way down” in the survey and that “most people thought they paid a fair price for what they got.”

But this doesn’t necessarily imply that cost isn’t a major impediment to access. It may just be that those surveyed—primarily lawyers—simply pass the cost of using PACER down to their clients and never bear the cost themselves. For the rest of PACER users who don’t have that luxury, the high cost of access can completely rule out certain kinds of legal research, or cause users to significantly ration and monitor their usage (as is the case even in the vast majority of our nation’s law libraries), or wholly deter users from ever using the service.

Judge Leonard rightly recognizes that it’s Congress that has authorized the collection of user fees, rather than using general taxpayer money, to fund the electronic public access program. But I wish the Courts would at least acknowledge that moving away from a fee-based model, to a system funded by general appropriations, would strengthen our judicial process and get us closer to securing each citizen’s right to equal protection under the law.

Rather than downplaying the barriers to public access, the Courts should work with Congress to establish a way forward to support a public access system that is truly open. They should study and report on the extent to which Congress already funds PACER indirectly, through Executive and Legislative branch PACER fee payments to the Judiciary, and re-appropriate those funds directly. If there is a funding shortfall, and I assume there will be, they should study the various options for closing that gap, such as additional direct appropriations or a slight increase in certain filing fees.

With our other two branches of government making great strides in openness and transparency with the help of technology, the Courts similarly needs to transition away from a one-size-fits-all approach to information dissemination. Public access to the courts will be fundamentally transformed by a vigorous culture of civic innovation around federal court documents, and this will only happen if the Courts confront today’s access barriers head-on and break them down.

(Thanks to Daniel Schuman for pointing me to the original article.)