Last week, I presented Part I of my written interview with a product manager and researcher at Free Law Project (FLP), Stephanie Taube. That column presented her answer to the first of my three questions and focused on FLP’s newest offering, RECAP Search Alerts for PACER. What follows are Stephanie’s answers to my remaining two questions. As usual, I have added some brief commentary to her answers below, but have otherwise presented her answers as she provided them.
Gaston Kroub: For younger lawyers and even those in law school, what can they do to increase their facility with FLP’s various tools?
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Stephanie Taube: CourtListener is an open source legal research platform that lawyers and law students can use to access our immense collection of case law, federal court documents and dockets, judges and their financial disclosures, and oral arguments. CourtListener supports highly advanced Boolean queries, allowing users to build complex searches. Users can set search alerts for those queries, or set docket alerts to follow particular dockets. We also offer several options for those who want to build their own systems with our data, including APIs, webhooks, bulk data, and database replication.
Did you know that PACER is the largest paywall on the internet? Our mission is to advance open access to the courts, and we have several tools that make PACER data available for free. Our users love the RECAP Extension — it’s used by tens of thousands of people. With the extension, your PACER purchases will be automatically added to the RECAP Archive in CourtListener, and anything another user has added to the archive will be available to you for free — right in PACER itself.
One of our newer features is the Pray and Pay Project. Users can “Pray” for PACER documents they want, and others can grant those prayers by purchasing those documents on their behalf. Since PACER waives your first $30 of purchases each quarter, we encourage our users to spend some of it on the community’s most-wanted documents. In the first few months since the feature launched, several thousands of dollars’ worth of prayers have already been fulfilled. The participation from our users has been really incredible.
GK: When I get contacted by law students or recent graduates asking for advice on how to get a job practicing IP litigation, one of my go-to answers is to try to figure out which firms have been active filing IP cases in the recent past — since they may be likelier to anticipate needing junior attorney help for even more filings, or to service the round of cases that they just filed. I think I am suggesting a worthwhile approach, but it also presumes that the newer or aspiring lawyer has some facility with PACER, so that they can perform the suggested research on IP cases, which are overwhelmingly filed in the federal courts. There is no doubt in my mind that FLP’s tools are a must-add to any aspiring federal court litigator’s toolbox, so the earlier one learns to use them the better.
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GK: What challenges do you and your team at FLP look forward to tackling in the coming years?
ST:We run some of the largest open legal systems in the world, and we have an ambitious roadmap. We’re collaborating with organizations like the University of Michigan, Amazon Web Services, courts and libraries around the country to deliver tremendous value to our users. Some of our highest-priority initiatives include new feature development, enhancing our search engine, and expanding our data and coverage.
We have several AI initiatives on our roadmap, and are currently developing the first open-source legal citator, in partnership with several startups. On that note, we’re currently seeking legal experts to help shape the accuracy and integrity of the Citator, and encourage those interested in volunteering to reach out.
Another project we’re working on is a platform that makes legal information and e-filing more user-friendly and accessible for self-represented litigants; we’re actively collaborating with courts to make this a reality. We are also enhancing our search engine, with features like semantic search coming soon. And finally, we are always expanding our data — some upcoming projects include adding SCOTUS filings and dockets, and adding transcripts for oral arguments. In addition to our stellar staff, our incredible partners and volunteer contributors help make all of this possible.
GK: Stephanie’s list of FLP projects in development is most impressive. It will be very interesting to see how the FLP team brings AI tools to bear on the huge volume of data generated by our legal system. In that vein, we can all root for a successful outcome with their Citator project, which looks to leverage AI capabilities in service of what has been a costly value-add service that lawyers and firms have traditionally been forced to pay for. Likewise, the other initiatives mentioned by Stephanie have promise – and I for one would welcome easy access to oral argument transcripts, in particular. All in all, it is clear that FLP’s legacy of innovation will continue for some time to come, to the benefit of us all.
My thanks to Stephanie for the insights and cooperation, and I wish her and her FLP colleagues continued success with their important work. Those inclined to provide financial support for FLP’s efforts will be making an impactful choice. We appreciate FLP’s contributions to date and I hope that we will continue to see FLP innovate in the service of their mission. I am always open to conducting interviews of this type with other IP thought leaders, so feel free to reach out if you have a compelling perspective to offer.
Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at [email protected] or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.
Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.