
Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall  - malte
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/recap-firefox-extension-builds-crowdsourced-pacer-mirror.ars
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JimmyL
I sent this link to a friend of mine who's a corporate lawyer for a large
international firm - her first response was "PACER sucks so hard right now;
maybe this will make it better", followed a few minutes later with "this is
pretty cool, but I think IT would flip if I installed it."

I think these comments were pretty indicative of what the RECAP people need to
do in order to make this really successful. My friend is exactly the kind of
person they would love to use this plugin - she has an essentially unlimited
PACER budget, and pulls 20 or so obscure cases a day out of it. She wants to
use it, but firm policy stands in her way.

Based on this, maybe the following would help its expansion:

\- For the lawyers, add some functionality to it. As opposed to making it just
a plug-in that copies data to the Internet Archive, make it a mini PACER-
specific browsing environment, something like ScribeFire or Firebug. I don't
know what PACER is missing (she says there's no built-in _Find_ , for
example), but I find it very hard to believe that if you pointed a decent UX
designer at PACER for a few days they could find some things that could be
fixed by a plug-in. Add some value, and get PACER's daily users (the line
attorneys) on-side.

\- For the firm, have someone whose job it is to bring large firms on board -
don't just rely on viral marketing to penetrate a large organization like an
international firm. Explain how it will only make lawyers more productive, how
it will cost them nothing, how no identifying data will leak out about their
searches (and provide an external legal & technological opinion to back this
up), and how they can consider it as an aspect of their pro-bono work. Add
some value from the firm's perspective, so the have a reason to spend some
money (in the form of time) to getting this installed.

\- For the firm's IT department, produce a guide to the source code (so they
can understand it if they want to), and a report from an external consultant
that did a code review of it that explains how there's no security bugs or
possibility of extra charging.

Getting small firms to use this will provide some benefit, but I suspect the
real win would come if a few big US firms (on the scale of Clifford
Chance/Linklaters/Jones Day) added this to their official corporate desktop
images. These are the guys that have unlimited PACER accounts, and that access
somewhat more obscure cases that smaller firms wouldn't need access to (and
would probably already find in the index).

~~~
jgfoot
Large law firms are going to be a difficult target.

1\. They would be concerned that disclosing to the RECAP people exactly what
research they've been doing on PACER could violate client confidence. (They
might be wrong, but someone somewhere is going to raise this as a legal risk
sufficient to tank the whole idea).

2\. The idea of giving away for free something that cost them money is just
not part of the DNA.

3\. Windows and Internet Explorer dominate, so a Firefox extension is just not
going to work.

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mattyb
See here also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763039>

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timwiseman
This has a great deal of potential to make knowledge of the law and an
understanding of the way government truly works more widely available.

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mikeytown2
What about sites like <http://openjurist.org/> ? Disclaimer: I've currently
working on improving this site

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euroclydon
If they have problems getting enough users to participate, accounts could be
created and associated with the plug-in, then donations to a foundation could
fund reimbursements of say, $0.04 per document.

