Part
important public resource, part anachronistic PDF filing cabinet, PACER (Public
Access to Court Electronic Records) is outdated at best and downright primitive
at worst. Admittedly, PACER has been a resource on which legal professionals
have relied for over two decades and when it was new, it was indeed
state-of-the-art. However, it has not kept pace with the driving force of
technology, and the Courts have allowed the PACER platform to become a relic of
an earlier Internet era. Powerful search tools, like Docket Alarm’s Federal
Court search engine, give you the ability to search PACER dockets in a much
more efficient and streamlined way.
Full Text Searching of the PACER
Database
Docket
Alarm improves upon many of PACER’s shortcomings. One major issue with PACER is
that it does not support full-text searching. Full-text search engines search
every word in every document in a database to match your entered search
criteria. Since the PACER platform was designed for finding only one case at a
time, your search capabilities are limited to searching by party name, case
number, filing date, and a few other specific fields. You are unable to enter
information in a general search field and have the system search every document
for phrases in your query. Thus, if you are unsure of exactly what you are
looking for, there is a high probability of being unable to find relevant cases
on PACER. This shortcoming in search capability is magnified by the fact that
each Federal Court has a different version of the PACER software, leading to
inconsistencies between interfaces.
Docket
Alarm supports full-text searching of the PACER database. You do not need to
have specific information about the party names or the case number. You can
type any identifying information in the Federal Court search field, including
party names, attorney names, judges, keywords, phrases or questions and Docket
Alarm’s Federal Court search engine will return relevant Federal cases.
Another
issue with PACER is the lack of meaningful ways to filter dockets and
documents. The goal of any highly useful search platform is to give you a
plethora of ways to narrow down your results, allowing you to find relevant
information as quickly as possible. PACER makes this narrowing-down process
very difficult. After entering a keyword into one of the PACER search fields,
you are returned with a list of results that may only be filtered by year,
court, court type office or case type. Again, PACER requires you to have very
specific information about what you are looking for to successfully find
meaningful results.
Docket
Alarm, on the other hand, allows you to filter before your search by either
dockets or individual documents, and also provides you with many specific
filters and suggested sub-filters after results are returned, such as filtering
by judge, by party name, by attorney name, nature of the suit, etc. Once you
have selected a docket or document, you can also create a keyword filter of
your choosing.
Tracking PACER Dockets
A
further issue with the PACER platform is an inability to track dockets. Docket
Alarm can alert attorneys every time there is a new development in the case
they have selected to track. With case updates arriving in your inbox, you can easily
stay abreast of the latest issues without having to waste time and effort
searching PACER, ensuring important updates do not fall through the cracks.
PACER Made Easy
In
addition to the above, the overall user-friendliness of PACER is incredibly
low. Flaws in the platform’s UX design create unnecessary usability issues. Users
are rerouted to different query search pages and category buckets after
selecting a case, calling for many more clicks than necessary to accomplish a
relatively simple task, such as viewing a docket or particular document. While more
clicks may seem trivial, any person who has spent hours searching PACER knows
that jumping through these hoops adds up to a lot of wasted time.
Docket
Alarm makes viewing whole dockets or individual documents, emailing, copying,
printing, and tracking incredibly easy, by providing clear buttons and a clean
design, requiring minimal steps to execute these essential tasks.
With
Docket Alarm’s Federal Court search engine, you have many tools at your
disposal to maximize the usefulness of the PACER databases.
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Docket Alarm is an advanced search and litigation tracking service for the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB), the International Trade Commission (ITC), Bankruptcy Courts, and Federal Courts across the United States. Docket Alarm searches and tracks millions of dockets and documents for thousands of users.
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