Proposed Settlement Would Set Aside $125M for Pacer Refunds

Some users of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) system run by the federal judiciary could see full refunds of the fees they paid to access federal court documents, according to a proposed settlement agreement between three nonprofits and the federal judiciary submitted Tuesday to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The terms of the settlement set aside $125 million to establish a common fund to automatically reimburse more than 400,000 Pacer class users up to $350 for any fees paid April 21, 2010, to May 31, 2018. Users who paid over $350 during that period will receive a pro rata share of the remaining settlement funds, the proposed settlement said.

The case was originally brought in 2016 by the National Veterans Legal Services Program, National Consumer Law Center and Alliance for Justice, arguing that the judiciary violated the law by charging fees that went beyond the cost for providing the records. The Pacer system charges 10 cents a page for most court documents with a $3 cap on each record retrieved. Court opinions and decisions are free.

The refunds will be doled out to class members, including individual users, companies, academics and members of the media, if the settlement is ordered by the court. Previously in the action, a federal appeals court ruled that the charge of 10 cents a page was higher than needed to run the system.

"By any measure, this litigation has been an extraordinary achievement -- and even more so given the odds stacked against it," the proposed settlement said. Pacer fees "have long been the subject of widespread criticism because they thwart equal access to justice and inhibit public understanding of the courts," it said. But until this case was filed, litigation wasn’t seen as a realistic path to reform."

Legislation called the Open Courts Act that would make Pacer case searches free is estimated to add $77 million to the federal deficit by 2032, reported the Congressional Budget Office last month. The federal judiciary and the General Services Administration would be required to develop a centralized case management system for all federal court records that the public could access at no cost. To help pay for it, the judiciary would temporarily increase some fees for access to court documents for high-volume Pacer users, though the fees would be completely eliminated in 2026.