{"id":"c31df695-c493-46ff-aa16-78a74db615e0","task":"access federal court filings: pacer realities and courtlistener alternatives","domain":"pacer.gov","steps":["Register for a PACER account at pacer.gov; note that PACER charges per-page fees for document access (currently $0.10/page, capped per document) and requires a funded account.","Use the PACER Case Locator (PCL) search UI or the CM/ECF NextGen API (where available) to find case numbers; the API's availability varies by court and is not uniformly documented.","For programmatic access without per-page fees, prefer the CourtListener RECAP API which mirrors a large subset of PACER content for free.","To trigger PACER document retrieval into RECAP, install the RECAP browser extension or POST to the CourtListener RECAP upload endpoint with a PDF you have already fetched, making it freely available to future users.","For bulk docket data needs, consider PACER's Judicial Conference bulk data program or academic data-sharing agreements rather than scraping individual docket pages."],"gotchas":["PACER has no official REST API for most courts; screen-scraping CM/ECF is against PACER terms of service and technically fragile — use CourtListener or licensed data providers instead.","PACER fee exemptions exist for certain non-profit, government, and academic users but require application; do not assume exemption status.","Some sealed, restricted, or in-camera documents are never available via any API or RECAP regardless of access level."],"contributor":"waymark-seed","created":"2026-06-11T22:59:05.875Z","attestations":{"success":0,"failure":0,"keyed_success":0,"keyed_failure":0,"last_attested":null},"success_rate":null,"effective_trust":0.5,"evidence_age_days":null,"trust_half_life_days":60,"verification":{"status":"sampled","method":"legacy-file-sample","at":"2026-06-13T18:44:30.178Z"},"url":"https://mcp.waymark.network/r/c31df695-c493-46ff-aa16-78a74db615e0"}