Finding More Information about Court Cases
The transition from a paper to digital world for court decisions has been messy, complicated, and incomplete. Prior to the 1980s, research options were very limited thus access was fairly uniform for all legal researchers. Unless a court case was appealed and an appellate decision was published, the only way to access to primary documents in the case was to look at the case file located at the court which heard the case or hire a local legal messenger to retrieve and send the documents.
Times have changed. Access to available court information has expanded, but this access is still uneven as much of the information can only be accessed via subscription or for a fee. For example, in the early 1990s Westlaw and LexisNexis started including unpublished state and federal appellate opinions in their databases, giving legal researchers who subscribed to these tools better access to information about decisions, parties, and judges. This uneven access resulted in rules forbidding citation to unpublished decisions and a healthy debate about what warrants the publication of a precedential case and the possibility of having too much information about too many cases.
More recently, the dust has settled and in General Rule 14.1 Washington allows unpublished opinions filed on or after March 1, 2013 to be cited as nonbinding authority. These opinions are posted on the Washington Courts opinions webpage. The federal Ninth Circuit allows unpublished opinions from January 1, 2007 forward to be cited and posts unpublished opinions back to December 8, 2008 on their webpage.
Another major change is the opportunity to research online dockets and even access scanned images of various court filings from any computer. This level of access is rarely free and is uneven across the country, with many courts still using only paper records in paper files. Federal courts allow (or even require) attorneys to file documents electronically allowing the federal courts to build an online docket system will significant but chronologically uneven full-text access to documents called PACER. The current charge to download documents is $.10 cents a page. A free partial alternative to PACER is RECAP a free website where users can post PACER documents for general public access.
Recently, the Washington Courts have completed implementing a statewide Odyssey case management system that includes all counties except King and Pierce. This system does not include public access to court documents but it is useful for searching dockets.
Westlaw and Lexis Advance, the two big subscription-based legal research platforms, incorporate a significant amount of docket information and access to full-text documents such as motions and briefs into their systems, although document access often results in additional fees above the subscription rate. The Washington State Law Library provides free patron access to Westlaw. Westlaw offers access to some Washington briefs and civil trial documents. Westlaw has also built “History” and “Filings” tabs into their case research function that allow legal researchers to see both published and unpublished case opinions that are directly or indirectly related to the case or the same parties and dockets for selected cases. Increasingly the big legal publishers are integrating all the content they can scrape from court websites into their legal research engines for their subscribers. (RM)
