Class Action Accuses Federal PACER System of Overcharging

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A class action lawsuit has been filed accusing the Public Access to Courts Electronic Records system (PACER)—the online database created and run by the U.S. government to allow access to federal court records—of systematically overcharging its customers.

The PACER system normally charges 10 cents ($0.10) per page to view a document, up to a maximum of $3.00 per document. However, the class action lawsuit alleges that when a user accesses a document as HTML text on a webpage, “PACER artificially inflates the number of bytes in each extracted page, counting some of those bytes five times instead of just once.”

Those additional fees for extra pages can add up to large sums of money, according to the PACER overcharge class action lawsuit. Plaintiff Bryndon Fisher claims that in the past two years, he has paid $109.40 to PACER for court records. Fisher alleges that he should have paid only $72.40 for those records, based on their actual number of pages.

The PACER class action lawsuit states that the systemic overcharge caused Fisher to pay $37.00 more than he should have, which is an increase of 51 percent.

Fisher states in the overcharge class action lawsuit that he hired computer specialists to diagnose the error in the PACER system, and they discovered that the error is in how PACER calculates the number of pages for web-based documents.

Users may view court documents in a couple of ways on PACER, but the default is as HTML text on a webpage. When a user views a document through PACER as a webpage, the system is supposed to charge every 4,320 bytes of information as one page.

However, Fisher’s experts discovered that the case caption, which is typically at the beginning of most court documents, is counted by PACER up to five times when it converts the number of bytes to pages for its billing system. When the case caption is over 850 characters long, this systemic error causes PACER to charge for an extra page, assuming the document is not long enough to trigger the $3.00 maximum.

The class action lawsuit claims that PACER has over 2 million different user accounts, for attorneys, journalists, and the general public. The PACER overcharge lawsuit seeks to represent a Class of “[a]ll PACER users who, within the last six years, accessed a U.S. District Court, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, or the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and were charged for at least one docket report in HTML format that included a case caption containing 850 or more characters.”

The overcharge class action lawsuit alleges that the additional fees are in violation of the billing terms on PACER’s own website, the rules created by the Judicial Committee in charge of PACER, and the mandate set out by Congress when it passed the legislation for the creation of the federal electronic database.

Fisher is represented by Noah M. Schubert, Robert S. Schubert, and Miranda P. Kolbe of Schubert Jonckheer & Kolbe LLP.

The PACER Overcharge Class Action Lawsuit is Fisher v. The United States of America, Case No. 1:15-cv-01575, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.