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Comment by cdolan | Hacker News Reader

courtlistener and the Recap program fill a vital niche at the moment.

Recap takes any PACER document you purchase and automatically adds it to CourtListener for others to see/download.

Hopefully it will become obsolete soon!

I've been burning up every cent of my free $30/month PACER credit liberating important filings into RECAP for the last five years. The last year and a half of this administration has made this task very hard to keep up with as there are so many federal lawsuits and criminal cases. I just screwed up and accidentally went over my free limit so now I owe a real pound of flesh to the courts. Maybe my debt will be wiped out when the new Act is effective?

And a protip for non-US HN readers: you don’t need to be a US resident/citizen to get your own account and make requests and contribute to RECAP yourself!

Which types of foreign citizens are that interested in US court cases?

The same type of eccentric foreign citizens you're likely to find here.

Sometimes products/services you use are provided by US companies, and the juicy stuff is in the court filings.

For the most part, RECAP just eliminates inconvenience. For matters of widespread interest, RECAP saves thousands of people from having to make PACER accounts. But the stuff that ends up on RECAP, for obvious reasons, tends to be the small minority of cases that the public is interested in, and for the most part that content is practically (sometimes literally) free.

I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins enabled in the browser session I use to read PACER. I'm just saying, it's not really a liberation of all of PACER.

Agree -- RECAP is 100x easier to use than the official PACER. Plus RECAP is Google/LLM indexed, whereas PACER being paywalled means nothing is indexed, and their search is also annoying. In fact the whole PACER site has that real 1993 "I wrote this in perl with cgi-bin" feel.

Sometimes you hit the sweet spot where you’re using up your $30 “free” credit and letting someone else use theirs for the next batch of documents. I don’t find it hard to find stuff that others haven’t submitted to RECAP.

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