New and improved PacerPro Now Offers Litigant Profiling

A few years ago on this blog, I wrote about PacerPro: “I wish this was available during my law librarian days as I slogged through the clunky PACER interface more times than I care to remember.” PacerPro has since become a lot more than a slick way to find and retrieve federal dockets, records, and documents. It’s become a case tracking and litigant profiling application.

The good folks at PacerPro demoed the new Litigant Profiling functionality along with the new and improved features and it’s a big win for law firms; especially for researchers, paralegals, and litigation specialists responsible for managing the firm’s docket filings and alerts.

The Litigant Profiling feature is the most complete you can find out there as it draws directly from PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) in real time. In fact, the folks at PacerPro encourage users to compare their results to other similar programs that use PACER as the back-end for their litigation profiles, including Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg.

Richard Reiben, who joined the PacerPro team after 32 years at West/Thomson Reuters, put it like this:

“The big players provide a lot of great functionality – but, no one can do everything. That’s where we come in, providing unique, high quality tools that effectively address the widely acknowledged pain points caused by working with PACER.

At it’s simplest, PacerPro makes it quick and easy for a law firm to automate the administratively burdensome Federal Dockets landscape so the researcher and staff can focus on higher-value activities.”

Simply enter the name of a litigant, add a date range and client-matter, and you’ll get a page with the search syntax, case summaries, a breakdown of where the cases were filed, types of cases, and the option to sort and filter results. See below, a sneak peek of sleek new interface due out this month.

Check out the step-by-step instructions for using the new Litigant Profiles feature by one of my favorite law librarians, John DiGilio, National Manager of Library Research Services for Reed Smith.

PacerPro also provides a tutorial.

I asked attorney and head of sales at PacerPro, Anna McGrane, about additional bells and whistles that other litigation profile applications provide:

“We’re definitely careful about how we roll things out – we want to make sure we’re offering something new to the market that genuinely helps people do their job.
Take the litigant profiler as an example. Depending on what you’re willing to pay, there are a lot of options out there, and some of them provide some pretty cool tools, including advanced analytics.

However, those tools don’t always get the job done.

Why?

For one, the other profilers rely on incomplete records. Two, getting the convenience of pre-baked analytics also means relying on a 3rd party’s assessment of the facts. Depending on how important the research question is, that kind of reliance can be problematic for law firms, since a lot of the value we add as legal professionals is the ability to look at facts in new and novel ways. Three, they’re pricey, and even at big firms, that can discourage you from doing additional research.

PacerPro takes a different approach. One, we provide access to complete data sets. Two, it’s generally less than a dollar in pass through PACER fees to run a search. Three, instead of trying to do the thinking work for you, we focus on making it quick and easy for you to find the facts (files, cases) so that, as the researcher, you can focus on the higher-level analysis.”

In a nutshell, PacerPro is a slick, efficient, and cost-effective way to find and retrieve federal dockets, records, and documents, track cases and profile litigants.

Here are a few PacerPro highlights:

FEATURES

• Case management:
  • Case dashboard: One, simple on-line dashboard where you can access update copies of all your cases (docket sheets and filings)
  • PDF to go: Get pdf copies of new filings in your email inbox within 1-2 minutes of the notice from the court. Copies of the filings can be sent to all team members at no additional charge.
• Cloud: free access to all your documents (and anything in our database) available on the cloud. This feature has helped clients reduce their PACER fees 25-30%.
• Search: We’re the only search platform going to PACER in real-time – meaning our results yield unique competitive intelligence.

COST
PacerPro charges a flat software fee of $15-$30 per month per user. Unlike other providers, we don’t charge extra for PACER documents or for PACER searches. All contracts are cancel anytime.

The widely respected Bob Ambrogi is on PacerPro’s board (if that’s not the stamp of approval firms need to use this product, I don’t know what is) and has a comprehensive writeup of how the program works, which begins with, “If I were to tell you that a new service could help you avoid a $40 million mistake in litigation, would you be interested?”

Sure you would.