Using DocketFish May Make You Hate Pacer Less

If you do any litigation in federal court, you are already locked into the deathless embrace of PACER to file your documents, see your opponent’s filings, and conduct research. Since PACER has an interface that appears to have last been updated circa Netscape 3.0, a cottage industry has arisen (see PacerPRO, for example) to create a front-end research overlay that makes the PACER experience less terrible. The latest entry in this effort is DocketFish.

Like PACERPro, DocketFish gives you a friendlier interface that will automatically log you in and saves your searches. DocketFish also caches documents on their own servers so that you are not paying for documents twice or more when you look up the same things on PACER again and again. Think you don’t do that? Docketfish’s research says that 40% of firm downloads from PACER are duplicates. That can add up. Cached documents from DocketFish are always free. It also batches documents for you so you can bulk download rather than engage in the painful and tedious document-by-document format PACER uses.

DocketFish has a free plan (though you will still pay your PACER charges, of course) but you will need the premium plan to get those bulk downloads. The premium plan also gets you things like case alerts. Unfortunately, you will need to hit up DocketFish to find out how much that will run you.