Court Video Developments

Three notable courtroom video projects have recently been launched.

First, proceedings of the UK Supreme Court are now being televised and Webcast live on SkyNews. Click here for Professor Simon Fodden’s post about this project at Slaw.ca.

Second, a pilot project to offer live video coverage of proceedings in selected U.S. federal district courts has been launched.

Third, proceedings of the Massachusetts Commonwealth District Court in Quincy are being Webcast live daily by OpenCourt, a project of WBUR in Boston. This project is funded by the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. OpenCourt posts updates on Twitter at @OpenCourtus.

If you know of other recent developments in offering video/Internet access to court proceedings, please feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Accessing PACER Cases Free of Charge

A procedure for accessing full text judicial decisions free of charge on PACER — the U.S. federal courts’ database of court decisions and litigation materials — has been posted by Mark Rosch. The procedure has been recently discussed by Nick Moline of Justia.

Oddly, this procedure does not seem to be mentioned in the FAQ on the PACER Website.

This functionality appears to have been introduced in 2005, according to a 2005 announcement from the PACER Service Center. (HT @sglassmeyer.) However, this information does not appear to be readily accessible on the PACER Website. In fact, to date, the PACER FAQ does not appear to make any mention of the availability of PACER cases free of charge.

Posting this procedure in the PACER FAQ — where, one would think, most PACER users are likely to look for information about the costs of using PACER — would seem to be in the public interest, because such posting is very likely to reduce PACER users’ costs of retrieving judicial decisions from PACER, and to encourage more citizens to use PACER as a source of judicial decisions.

On a related note, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced yesterday that twelve U.S. federal courts will participate in a pilot project to enhance public access to the judicial decisions on PACER that are available free of charge. The decisions are to be made available through the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys system. This pilot project is a joint effort between the Judicial Conference of the United States and GPO.

For more on PACER, please see Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post, PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

HT @evwayne.

May 10-11, 2010: Civil Litigation Conference at Duke Law School

A live Webcast is available for the 2010 Civil Litigation Conference, sponsored by the Judicial Conference of the United States, and being held 10-11 May 2010 at Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

The conference will focus on empirical research on U.S. federal civil litigation, including research on lawyers’ satisfaction with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, judicial decisions (Iqbal and Twombly and cases applying them) respecting pleading rules, ediscovery, the “vanishing trial”, incentives for settlement, and experimentation and proposals respecting civil litigation reform in U.S. states, including research conducted by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver (IAALS).

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for information about the conference from Duke Law.

Click here for an article about the conference from Tony Mauro at National Law Journal.

Lee & Willging, Attorney Satisfaction with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Emery G. Lee III and Thomas E. Willging, both of the Federal Judicial Center, have published Attorney Satisfaction with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: Report to the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules (2010). Here is the executive summary:

This report provides a brief comparison of the results of three surveys on the current operation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (“Rules”). These surveys asked attorneys in the American College of Trial Lawyers (“ACTL”), the American Bar Association Section of Litigation (“ABA Section”), and the National Employment Lawyers Association (“NELA”) to respond to a series of statements regarding the Rules. The Federal Judicial Center (“FJC”) did not administer the ACTL survey, but it did administer the ABA Section and NELA surveys. Respondents in the ACTL survey had many more years of practice, on average, than respondents in the other surveys. The following findings are discussed in this report:

• Members of the ABA Section tended to agree that the Rules are conducive to the goals stated in Rule 1 (“to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding”), but ACTL fellows and NELA members tended to disagree.
• The statement, “The Rules must be reviewed in their entirety and rewritten to address the needs of today’s litigants,” elicited more disagreement than agreement in each of the surveys and among all groups (plaintiff attorneys, defendant attorneys, and attorneys representing both plaintiffs and defendants about equally).
• The statement, “One set of Rules cannot accommodate every type of case,” elicited more disagreement than agreement from ABA Section and NELA members, and more agreement than disagreement from the ACTL fellows.
• The statement, “Trial dates should be set early in the case,” elicited more agreement than disagreement with every group except ABA Section defendant attorneys.
• The statement, “Discovery is abused in almost every case,” elicited more disagreement than agreement from the ACTL fellows and ABA Section plaintiff attorneys, and more agreement than disagreement from NELA members and other ABA Section members.
• The statement, “Economic models in many law firms result in more discovery and thus more expense than is necessary,” elicited more agreement than disagreement in each of the surveys and among all groups.
• The statement, “The cumulative effect of the changes [enacted since the Pound Conference in 1976] has significantly reduced discovery abuse,” elicited more disagreement than agreement in every survey and among every group except ABA Section plaintiff attorneys.
• The statement, “Intervention by judges or magistrate judges early in the case helps to limit discovery,” elicited more agreement than disagreement in each of the surveys and among every group.
• The statement, “Judges do not enforce Rule 26(b)(2)(C) to limit discovery,” elicited more agreement than disagreement in each of the surveys and among every group, although ABA Section plaintiff attorneys were almost evenly divided.
• The statement, “Summary judgment practice increases cost and delay without proportionate benefit,” elicited more agreement than disagreement from plaintiff attorneys in each of the surveys and more disagreement than agreement from defendant attorneys and those representing both plaintiffs and defendants about equally.
• Attorneys in all three surveys reported that costs were disproportionate to the value of some cases, although respondents in the ABA Section and NELA surveys tended to answer that costs are not disproportionate to the value of large cases.
• In all three surveys, the most common response to the question asking about “the primary cause of delay in the litigation process” was “time to complete discovery.”

Respondents to the NELA survey were also asked a series of questions about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent pleadings decisions [known as Iqbal and Twombly] on employment discrimination cases. The most commonly reported impact was the inclusion of additional facts in the complaint, followed by an increase in the number of motions to dismiss filed by defendants. Few respondents, however, reported that any of their employment discrimination cases had been dismissed under the new standard.