PACER: How Journalists Mine Records
Use PACER to Find Court Records and Background People
Program Date: March 7, 2022

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is an invaluable tool for journalists, Reuters reporter Brad Heath told Paul Miller fellows March 7. This includes federal bankruptcy information, which Heath said is an often overlooked way of backgrounding people.  You can also get email alerts whenever there is a new filing in a case. And by looking for lawyers who are repeatedly handling cases on your beat, you can identify sources.

Heath suggests starting with the Party Case Locator: pcl.uscourts.gov. “In court, a party is a person or a business that’s one of the entities on one side of the lawsuit. And that gets you to this search, which gives you access to the nationwide index of federal court cases and you can get from here into basically everything.” Start with the first filings in the docket, Heath said.

While PACER charges per page, the Free Law Project site CourtListener puts up millions of records from PACER for free thanks, in part, to the browser extension RECAP (PACER spelled backwards) and it allows you to set up docket alerts outside of PACER.

PACER only includes federal courts. It does not include the Supreme Court. And the search function is limited. “You have to know what you want,” Heath said. “There are other tools out there that will let you search within the text of a document to say, ‘show me all the things where they’re alleging medical malpractice involving this particular device,’ … PACER will not do that for you.”

Other tools include Sqoop, PACER Pro, LexisNexis, CourtLink (a LexisNexis product), Westlaw, Accurint and TLO.

LexisNexis is a good starting point for backgrounding someone, but beware: “a lot of what you will see when you look at them is wrong. It’s either out of date … it’s information that actually belongs to another person,” Heath said. “This is the sort of thing that you can use really only as a tip sheet. You should never print something that says, ‘according to a Lexis search’ … Don’t do it. But it does give you a good enough start.” For instance, it’s worth calling the cellphone numbers.

Local court systems and property transactions are also good ways to find leads and confirm what you think you know to make it reportable. “The more you know about a person, even just their address, the more doors will open,” Heath said. You might file a FOIA for  911 calls from that address or review the mortgage. “We did a lot of that with [Former National Security Adviser] Mike Flynn last year … seemed like the guy should be making money, and maybe he’s paying off his mortgages. What are the visible signs of somebody making money? … One door opens another door, opens another door. And before you know it, you can come up with a really comprehensive picture of at least some section of a person’s life.”

More Q&A between NPF fellows and Heath, lightly edited:

Q: Is there any way to track when a new party files an initial lawsuit? … I’d like to be able to know when somebody files without someone having to send me a press release about it.

A: Yes, but not through PACER. There are third-party services that will let you do things like that. I think a site called Sqoop would let you do it. … And then, LexisNexis and Westlaw… will also allow you to run reports like that, and to be alerted when a party shows up in something new. But PACER, no.

Q: I’m a regional reporter, and I cover very specific people (congressional delegation). … What’s a good thing to get into either on a daily basis, on a weekly basis that’s the best bang for your buck?

A: If I were just covering Washington as a regional correspondent, I would not do a daily PACER search every day. Because odds are that you will not break the news of a litigation involving a member of Congress by doing that. Somebody else will have found it first because there are people who are just on the federal courts all day. That’s not you. It shouldn’t be you. You’ll probably see it on Twitter.  … But if all you want to do is see have they been sued, weekly is probably more than sufficient.

[Heath explained the process:]

• Go to pacer.gov
• Search for a case > by a specific court
• Go to the CM/ECF lookup
• Go into the filing system
• Find your district
• Query, do the date filed and do the previous week or however frequently you’re checking.
• You can then see criminal cases (CR) and civil (CV).

“If you do this once a week, you will have a reasonably good idea of what’s going on. And then, anything you decide you’re curious about … view the docket report.”

Q: Is there an easier way to get transcripts from hearings instead of waiting the 90 days for them to be uploaded to PACER?

A: [Yes, you can pay for them or ask the attorneys.] In the federal courts, the court reporters are independent contractors. You can get a transcript very, very quickly. You call the judge’s chambers and say, ‘I want the telephone number for the court reporter, or the email.’ You contact that person, and you pay them for the transcript. And you’ll pay them more to rush it. … Usually, you can get it in a day or two…[If the case will] be appealed, then it’s possible one of the lawyers on either side will have already ordered the transcript, and maybe they’ll give it to you. You save money if you’re not the first person to ask for it.

Q: You go in to find a case … looking for a complaint, maybe looking at the affidavit. Are there some other documents that are housed in there … that are overlooked, that could be really helpful?

A: Yes. I’m a big fan of pretrial motions. There’ll be motions to suppress, motions to dismiss, motions to disqualify … Suppression motions are always because the government did this terrible thing. And dismissal motions are always because, well, this indictment isn’t even for a crime. What are we even doing here? And sometimes, they will put attachments at the end of that to try to make their case even stronger, and those are always good because those give you a peek behind the curtain. Generally, any time the judge takes the time to issue an order, or especially a memorandum order or an opinion, those are going to be interesting … But in general, if you’re really interested in a case, my advice is to read everything. … You can tell pretty quickly whether this is worth continuing to read in the first two pages.

Q: What should you know if you don’t have a law degree?

A: The best is always [to] find somebody who does and just gut check yourself. But I’ll tell you, the one mistake I see a lot is the pleading standard, the idea that somebody makes an allegation in court – it doesn’t mean it’s true. And then occasionally, the judge will repeat the allegation, because they’re early on in the case, before you’ve had a chance to bring in evidence, before you’ve had a chance to really put the facts before anybody, there’s going to be disputes about what the law is. And in that entire phase of litigation, the judge is required to take everything you, the plaintiff, said as true. Unless it’s just absolutely crazy nonsense, the judge is required to take it as true. And the judge will therefore say, “Agent so and so shot so and so in the behind while he was running away” … That’s the judge reciting the allegations, not finding that the allegations are true. And I do see people get into trouble conflating those things, and it’s not super intuitive.

Q:  I’m often asked what are the penalties for a particular alleged offense, such as Steve Bannon being charged with contempt of Congress. Is your advice to just steer clear?
A: I would try not to touch it, because my inclination is not to speculate as to any particular person’s criminal liability, right? It just seems super fraught. And if you write it and say, ‘Well, he’s charged with this, and the penalty goes up to 20 years in prison,’ what headline is your editor going to put on there? “Faces 20 years in prison.” But it’s not right.

An experienced criminal defense lawyer who does white collar work in D.C. could probably give you a ballpark of if a person with no criminal history points gets convicted of this offense, and what would the guideline calculation be. [But] nobody’s been convicted of that in decades, so it’s not like a drug charge where you can look and say, ‘People with a pound of meth tend to get between here and here.’ … Every [January 6th] defendant has an obstruction charge, and they’re not getting 20 years. And nobody gets the statutory maximum. John Gotti or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed would maybe get the statutory maximum, but you got to be somebody pretty special. And I just think it’s really tricky.

If somebody comes to me and says, ‘We should do a story about did so and so commit a crime’ – no, absolutely not. Because we’re not really situated to know. We don’t know all the facts, and at best, the laws are tricky. The federal criminal laws are really tricky, because a lot turn on state of mind. What did you intend to do? And how do you prove what somebody intended to do at this moment? And if you intended to do this slightly different thing, then it’s not a crime at all. So, beware.

Brad Heath
Reporter, Reuters
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