> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.
Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.
Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.
PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth.
The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.
>Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.
I don't know about that; I've used PACER a fair amount, despite also using Westlaw.
Attorneys use PACER (fed by CM/ECF) to retrieve pleadings. Very little is done with hardcopy anymore.
> They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.
So I'm not familiar with this area at all, but aren't only the major rulings annotated? Based off of this sibling comment [0] (which I have no idea is correct or not), PACER is mainly used for exhibits, briefs, and motions, and I wouldn't expect for LexisNexis and Westlaw to annotate these.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48605601
It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter.
I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.
$30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place
It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.