Start Following Dockets & Filings – For Free
December 28, 2011
Practice Management, Technology
By Tyson Snow
A lot of practitioners pay a lot of money to get (what they think) is a lot of information that other practitioners do not have. But, despite what some commercial services claim, you don’t have to pay for access to nearly every federal court docket in the country. Justia’s Dockets & Filings can ensure you will know your clients have been sued before they do. In all seriousness, I have looked up docket reports (for free on Justia), found clients listed as a defendants, and been able to call the client to warn them about the impending suit before the potential embarrassing service of process during business hours.
Docket information is valuable
There is a reason a lot of people pay for these programs. There is value in knowing what a court’s docket looks like. As you browse Justia’s Dockets & Filings site, you will notice that you can narrow your docket search by a variety of factors; this allows you to quickly focus on the info most valuable to your practice:
- Type of suit (Contract, Tort, Employment, IP, Social Security, etc.)
- Cases filed in any given federal circuit
- Cases filed by state
- Most recent cases filed
Get even more
Want to delve deeper? Maybe it is a competitor that is suddenly embroiled in litigation. Or maybe there is a new matter that might have some helpful pleadings you would like to see. Justia has you covered.
Each case has an individual page with a link to the PACER info page (you do need a subscription to access those documents – 8 cents per page – easily worth the costs for a case you care about) as well as blog, news, finance and web searches on the party names. Depending on the particular case, you can often get some good background information on the parties. An example, is the page on the Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Apple Inc. iPhone trademark dispute.
As the excerpt notes, you can often get a whole host of information, even without PACER.
Use RSS!
Now, for the killer feature: RSS feeds. The possibilities are endless. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader but any feed aggregator will do. Simply subscribe to the docket / filing feed you are interested in, and the cases show up in your feed reader. Right now I subscribe to RSS feeds for all cases filed in Utah and all cases that involve a select group of clients (you can search by client name). When I check Google Reader every day, I know everyone who has been sued in federal court and, just maybe, I might know an involved party to whom I can give a courtesy call to let them know what to expect.
The real nuts and bolts
If you really like to drill down, you can sort and search using any combination of the following categories:
- Party name
- Judge
- Specific court the case was filed in
- Numerous sub-categories (under Contract, Tort, Employment, IP, Social Security, etc.)
- Show “all cases” or only cases with downloadable orders or opinions
- All dates or just a specific date range
Thus, if you were an employment litigator in a given jurisdiction, you could track all employment cases filed in that jurisdiction or all cases filed against a specific employer. You can even limit it by date or by a specific judge you prefer. The combinations are endless.
Happy docket racing!
About the author: Tyson B. Snow, Esq., is a founding partner at Mumford West & Snow, LLC, in Salt Lake City. His practices focuses on management-side employment litiation and all facets of tech-lit. He regularly blogs on the interplay of social media and the law at his Social Media, Esq.™ blog. You can follow him on Twitter at: @tysonESQ.
