Organized Money The Monopolists Who Gatekeep the Court System
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Jan 28, 2026 Mike Lissner, co-founder and CTO of the Free Law Project, builds open tools to publish court documents and legal texts. He unpacks how a duopoly turned public records into costly paywalled commodities. They explore PACER fees, citation control, crowdsourced fixes like RECAP, scanning reporter books, neutral citations, and why open legal data matters for access, security, and innovation.
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Adopt Neutral Citations
- Courts should adopt neutral citations formatted like '2026 SCOTUS 1' so anyone can cite decisions without proprietary page numbers.
- Implementing neutral citations reduces dependence on private publishers and simplifies access.
PACER Is Vast And Costly
- PACER contains approximately 2 billion federal court documents and costs users per page, creating huge access friction.
- Downloading the full PACER corpus would cost billions and grows daily by about 100,000 documents.
Use RECAP To Share PACER Documents
- Use the RECAP browser extension to crowdsource PACER documents and make purchased filings public.
- Install RECAP so documents you buy from PACER become freely available to others.