Big Data Hits a Wall c. J O’Grady

The disruption of access to court dockets through Pacer has implications beyond the retrieval of dockets and documents.

The  Administrative Office of the US Courts announced on August 11th that archival dockets from 5 federal courts would no longer be available through Pacer. I contacted the Office of the US Courts and they explained that the problem was in fact the courts themselves. The courts including the Second Circuit had failed to upgrade their platforms and the older data was residing on a platform that was no longer compatible with Pacer.  The data which was no longer available from Pacer could be obtained directly from the courts.

The Big Data  Hits A Wall. The most shocking thing to me was the fact that a significant archive of federal court data was suddenly less available to the public for historical “big data” trend analysis.  Lexis, Westlaw and Blaw all have tools
for litigation analysis and trending which can be used to create charts and
analytics showing litigation trends by jurisdiction, judge, cause of action,
law firm. Big data is an increasingly valuable commodity. In law firms it is a valuable source of competitive intelligence. The federal government has recently recognized the value of “big data” in public administration. In this case the Pacer data should be useful for the analysis and judicial administration and workload. Why are the courts failing to recognize the importance of maintaining robust archives of litigation data?