Working at Justia today -- see what I found out!

I'm working at the Justia office today, and had a conversation worth sharing.

Conversation with Nick Moline, programmer at Justia

Moline:  We just added full text decisions, orders and opinions for federal district court cases if they've been filed at PACER.  This is in addition to the full documents that we post for featured cases.  We put a picture of a gavel <http://cases.justia.com/federal/district-court/>  next to the cases that have decisions in the files.

Minow:  Really!  Are all federal district court opinions available now?

Moline: The courts are supposed to post them, and most, but not all of the opinions are online. [Ed. note: According to PACER, this functionality "will only be available in courts that have installed District Court CM/ECF version 2.4 or higher, and will only provide free access to opinions filed after the court is actively using version 2.4"]

Minow:  And these are available for free?

Moline:  Yes, free.  They're already available free via PACER, but the general public wouldn't necessarily have access to the PACER database without registering.  Also, the PACER database is only searchable by date.  We cross-reference the decisions with our database of federal case filing that we've already fetched.  That means you can search by party name and case type. Soon we'll add more search capabilities.

Minow: Will we be able to search full text?

Moline: In some cases, yes.  Some of the documents are scanned, but others are converted from Word documents.  Most of the decisions are full-text searchable.  The lawyer submitted documents and filings are often still scanned documents at this point. You should see some of the handwritten docs from some of the pro se parties.  But most of the court decisions are full indexable. We use Google's Custom Search Business Edition, and I'm going to add a filter to focus on the cases to help folks search.   Google has already indexed about a thousand of the cases, and the results show up in a regular Google search.  For the scanned documents, Google does OCR the document to make it searchable if they can.

Minow: What dates do you cover?

Moline:  Today we have documents form 2006+.  Later this week we'll have the 2004 and 2005 cases. We will move back from there.

Minow: Does that mean I can go back and find cases with "library" as a keyword and find those cases.

Moline: Yes. If "library" is part of the party's name, you'll find the cases. If "library" is in one of the full text-searchable documents, you'll find those too - once Google has indexed them, which should be in a week or so.

Minow: When is the database updated?

Moline:  We run daily updates to update the database with new orders and opinions.

Minow: You know, I just had my own experience with that.  I subscribe to the cases that have been tagged "library" i.e.  http://news.justia.com/cases/library/.  On Aug. 20, I saw a decision had been issued in a library case that same day. I blogged it on Aug. 21, and got more hits on that post than any other in recent memory. Thanks for talking with us, and thanks for the great service!