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Access to Court Records on the Internet:
When Vision Meets Bandwidth
The news last week that CourtLink, a large provider of paid access to dockets, acquired JusticeLink, a successful court efiling company, illustrates the importance of the court records market. An examination of the vertical court industry--filing to access--shows that companies are seeking to mine new value from information. Similar to last year's acquisition of Sustain Technologies by the Daily Journal Corporation, the vertical alignment in the court industry reflects an effort to revolutionize the organization and resale of what is essentially a huge, historically untapped resevoir of public domain legal documents.
Essential to understanding access to court records is the concept of "near line" instead of "online" methods to obtain documents. One can have a copy of any public court record within a few hours, not through the Net but by hiring a legal messenger over the telephone with a credit card. The legal messenger bikes down to the courthouse, checks the docket for the case number, pulls the file, copies the brief and faxes it to the requesting lawyer. Voila, instant access to all public records. Costs vary, but expect to spend $100 to $200 for copying and faxing a file. When we discuss access to records, near line access is an important piece of the puzzle for now.
The movement from near line to online records in the courts is progressing but significant hurdles remain--in technology, cost and culture--to creating the vision of "access to everything by anybody at anytime."
The Low Cost of Near Line Versus Online
The underlying issues of paper-to-Net migration cut across industries. At the 1999 Special Libraries Association Conference in Minneapolis, representatives of the BBC, National Public Radio and CNN described their companies' efforts to operate in a completely digital environment. The BBC has thousands of hours of archived video and audio tape, some in older analog tape. New materials are produced in digital format. The vision at BBC is to make all this material available to every desktop in the organization, in broadcast quality, so an editor working on a story on Tony Blair, for instance, can pull a clip from a past interview and paste it in the new piece. The benefit to companies from creating digital assets is the ability to "repurpose" the information--in layman's parlance, to sell it again. The task of digitizing the archive is underway. The vision of all digital distribution remains but the costs of moving huge video files around is too high to pursue immediately, the BBC decided, and the project will take three to five years to complete.
NPR came to a similar conclusion as the BBC in analyzing what to do with its miles of audio tape in its archives. NPR decided to digitize all its audio interviews, but not to place the files online, even for its internal network. NPR has created a new generation card catalog, with "click to request" capability, and the tapes are then pulled from the library and sent to the reporter. This works well because NPR is located in a single building in Washington, D.C. More precisely, the card catalog allows the library to send a digital copy of a file is to the reporter, usually on tape or CD-ROM instead of over the network.
Essentially, based on what the BBC and NPR found, it's not practical for now to build a network that can accommodate the Internet vision of a wired legal industry, or rather the cost of moving so much data around a network is prohibitive (e.g., it's cheaper for the courts to have lawyers hire the legal messenger.) While roughly 20 fully digital, paperless courts are operating in the U.S., the high bandwidth networks are expensive to build and maintain. For those courts that are paperless, but do not publish the documents on the Net for public access, the question is: can those documents at least be made available to other courts on an Intranet. In the federal courts, for example, the U.S. Court Administrator's Office is seeking to allow court access to the complete case files of every other court and they are progressing toward a network to enable that goal.
Following NPR's path, an alternative approach is to create "near line" courts, where a lawyer can use the online docket to identify and request a file, which is then sent digitally by the court, rather than by legal messenger - or as an intermediate step the digital file is given to the legal messenger at the courthouse.
Online Dockets
The first step, then, in creating a near line digital court is placing the court docket online. Dockets include both the calendar of upcoming cases and the historical database of cases decided in the court but do not traditionally include the full text of the pleadings; the docket is the index to every pleading in the case file and a list of all hearings held and actions taken by the court. In general, appellate courts place the upcoming case schedule online, while trial courts place online their historical case list. More and more courts are placing dockets online. Despite the lessons of the Net, many courts continue to rely on a subscription fee. Instead, courts should use the experience of publishing dockets to learn about adding value to databases as preparation for generating far more revenue through related e-commerce applications.
Online dockets in federal and state courts have varying capabilities, and an examination of the different approaches the courts are using will help lawyers understand how to use them.
Federal Courts
The U.S. Supreme Court docket is available in three locations. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School posts the Supreme Court oral argument calendar as part of its publication of opinions, at http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/calendar.html. The Washington Post provides the Court's calendar, with helpful analysis of the issues, but court watchers have found that Infosynthesis offers an easy-to-use and especially complete version at http://www.usscplus.com/current/. In addition to the case law, many Supreme Court briefs are now available free at Findlaw, an offering that began in January 2000.
The U.S. Court Administrator's Office offers free access to the calendar through its U.S. Supreme Court Electronic Bulletin Board System and via the telephone through the U.S. Supreme Court Clerk's Automated Response Systems (CARS). The federal courts do not currently place the information on the Web.
The biggest change in the federal courts is the movement of trial court dockets to the Web. The Middle District of Florida was the first federal court to offer Web-based access to a docket, http://www.flmd.uscourts.gov. Previously, this information was available only through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), at a cost of sixty cents per minute. Now, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Diego has its docket online and other federal courts plan to offer the service. A message at the Web site warns that the free access currently provided may in the future revert to a subscription system of seven cents per page.
State Courts
Similarly to the calendar from the U.S. Supreme Court, state appellate courts often provide oral argument schedules at their Web sites. The Mississippi Supreme Court, for example, offers a searchable docket calendar at http://www.mssc.state.ms.us/DocketCalendar, as does the Alaska Court of Appeals at http://www.appellate.courts.state.ak.us/. The Oklahoma Supreme Court is maintaining a searchable list of mandates and denials of petitions for certiorari since 1997 at http://www.oscn.state.ok.us/.
State trial courts in California, Texas and Arizona are the leading examples of what a free online docket should offer.
At the San Diego Superior Court there is a two week calendar for civil, domestic, criminal and probate cases posted at http://www.sandiego.courts.ca.gov/superior/. The information is continually updated and, though the court says the information is provided without warranty, the direct source makes it as trustworthy as a commercial provider.
The Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, Arizona provides perhaps the most advanced online docket , http://www.supcourt.maricopa.gov/. The Web site states that: "This site provides real time access to more than 47 million Superior Court case records dating back to 1987. The Web site is experiencing a heavy load of approximately 5,000 to 7,000 hits a day and the Court's system is handling 30,000 or more database inquiries daily from Internet users."
In Dallas, Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, at http://courtstuff.com/5th/, has an automated system to notify attorneys of any case filing. The attorney subscribes to receive updates on a case he or she is involved with, which is tracked by Bar number. The power behind the email update is that the most interesting part of a docket is the case that lawyer has before the court.
A full historical search of court records is possible at the Denton County, Texas, Web site, http://justice.co.denton.tx.us/. The party name or cause number is required to narrow the search, and additional fields allow the user to specify date filed, party type (defendant or plaintiff) and case status. Thus, a lawyer can check all civil and criminal cases involving an individual, which would have previously required a trip to the courthouse or accessing a paid subscription service.
In other jurisdictions, the bar association or prosecutor are posting case schedules. The Chatanooga Bar in Tennessee publishes case schedules for both state and federal courts in the city as a service to its members, and makes the data freely available. In Jefferson City, Missouri, the Cole County Prosecuting Attorney posts criminal docket schedules for the court.
Paid Docket Services
The growing availability of free court dockets does not do away with lawyers' desire to access commercial services. Sometimes a lawyer will need a more robust search. KnowX, a West Group product, allows searches across jurisdictions to locate a broad array of information. There are a host of smaller companies that offer regional coverage for dockets, such as Verifacts, which provides information from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Texas and Arizona. There are also state-specific companies, including Legal Services of Georgia, providing paid docket searches.
When lawyers talk of online access to all public records they include business, professional and property records in addition to the courts. The records of the County Recorders Office, County Property Tax Assessor, or Secretary of State are necessary for property title or Uniform Commercial Code searches. These records are also beginning to come online, as described in a recent article by Los Angeles law librarian Carole Levitt, "How Public Are Public Records," February 2000, http://www.netforlawyers.com/.
The economics of online dockets are likely to mirror what has occurred more generally with legal publishing. The paid services will remain profitable because the demand for electronic docket information is increasing faster than the movement to free services on the Web. At the same time that all U.S. Supreme Court opinions and the case law from 46 states have become free online, the revenues of private legal publishers have increased. The dire predictions made in 1995 have not transpired--that the Internet would diminish the ability of publishers to invest in quality and add editorial enhancements to legal material.
In sum, there are a growing number of court dockets freely accessible on the Internet, but most large, urban court dockets remain available only through paid services, such as CourtLink. The efforts to place the full text of all pleadings online parallels the work in the broadcast industry--by BBC, NPR and CNN--to digitize and repurpose their information assets. Vertical legal industry alignments are part of a similar effort to find new value in court records. But the high cost of developing a network to carry a full digital load has slowed the implementation of the online vision, and made an understanding of how to use near line access essential to obtaining court and other public legal records.
Bradley J. Hillis, M.A., J.D.
March 6, 2000
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Discussion
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