Posted Wednesday, June 21, 2023 5:00 pm
Clark Merrefield | The Journalist's Resource
Last week, attorney Eugenie Reich shared tips and insights for finding facts and story ideas within court dockets for civil lawsuits, during an hourlong webinar hosted by The Journalist’s Resource.
Reich was an investigative reporter from 1998 to 2015, including for Nature, New Scientist and other science journalism outlets. She is author of the 2009 book “Plastic Fantastic,” chronicling the faked discovery of a superconductor made of plastic. Since 2018, she has worked in the Boston area as a lawyer representing whistleblowers.
A court docket is a record of everything that has happened during the course of a particular litigation, including court rulings, filings of key documents and notices of scheduled court hearings.
In the U.S., federal court dockets can be found via the Public Access to Court Electronic Records online portal, or PACER. State and local courts often have their own online systems for accessing dockets. Local courts sometimes call them "trial dockets” or “county dockets.”
Dockets, briefs, motions and other documents are ten cents per page on PACER with a cap of $3 per document. There is also a fee for searching PACER, which varies depending on the number of results.
There is no fee limit for searches, or for accessing transcripts — though the...
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