 Welcome to our 48th webinar for the help of an accidental government information library and series. I'm really excited today to have Jennifer Barron talk about court records. Jennifer has done one of these before for us and I'm very excited to have her back. Jennifer is the head of reference services and a lecturing fellow at Duke Law School's J. Michael Goodson Law Library where she provides regular instruction on legal research topics. Jennifer holds with a JD and an MLS professor at the University of Buffalo and previously worked as a graduate assistant in the UB's Charles B. Sears Law Library as well as Lockwood Library's former business government documents reference center. She served as secretary of NCLA's government resources section from 2009 to 2017. Thank you very much Jennifer. Thank you Linda and thanks to all of you for being here. I cannot believe it's been more than two years since my last webinar for NCLA on basic legal research. If you are here for that one, thanks for coming back and I want to assure you that there won't be a lot of overlap today. I think there's maybe two or three slides that overlap a little bit. Since in that webinar we focused a lot on locating legal precedent or primary law rather than these sorts of background materials from the original lawsuit or the trial that lead to eventually a court opinion that might be a legal precedent or primary law. So here's my plan for today. I'm drawing a dividing line between recent and historical cases which is a little bit arbitrary and I'll move it periodically just to warn you. Roughly early 2000s is a good cut off point and the methods that you'll use for both recent and historical case research are pretty similar but the sources will be different the older, the farther back you go. Now in my library we are asked to locate court filings and other case materials from all different eras quite a bit and if you're here today I suspect that you are too. And patrons could have any number of reasons for wanting this information. There could be academic purposes to write a paper, sort of background on a particular trial that they're researching for a paper. Genealogy is probably a pretty big one that those of you in public and general academic libraries deal with. People looking at their ancestors who were parties to a court case whenever that happened. Or it could be something that the patron is personally involved in or just emotionally invested in, something that's having an environmental impact in their neighborhood and they want to track what's going on with a pending case. So any number of reasons you can probably think of more but just keep that in mind. It's a pretty wide variety of questions that you might get. And even for people who do this type of research all the time, every question is a little different and knowing where to go and what to look for can be really confusing. So just to outline some of the terminology I'll be using today, I think most researchers will probably want to obtain or review the case's docket which will be a chronological list of activity that's going on in a particular legal proceeding. For proceedings that never go beyond a trial level court they may want to get a hold of the documents that were filed in that lawsuit or legal proceeding such as the complaint that kicks off a civil lawsuit or the criminal indictment at the start of a criminal case. If the case ends up being appealed from the trial court then you'll get some briefs that are filed by both sides basically laying out their argument and what they think the appellate court should do about the outcome of that trial case. There will also be briefs from interested third parties. The appellate court will also be sent selected items from the lower court which is known as the record on appeal or sometimes the appendix and those can all be really helpful documents to look at. And for both trial and appellate level cases transcripts of the proceedings might be available. They're a little bit easier to find at the appellate level than they are for trials but you can get them in both cases. We'll talk a little bit more about that today. So there is also some bad news here. Your users could also find out that something has been sealed by the court and it's going to be a little bit tougher to get if you're able to petition them to unseal it great but it could be a tough road. The court could also have destroyed the records either as part of its disposal plan or they might have been destroyed by fire, flood, all the natural enemies of archives. Some materials just aren't going to be available at the time is another bad news that your patrons might hear. Or if they are they might cost money to access. This is where you really sort out who's serious about this kind of research and who's just sort of curious. Fees are pretty common in this type of research. There's absolutely no guarantee even though they're public records that these materials are going to be free. Fees are very, very common. And there's also no guarantee that things will be available in the exact format that somebody wants. Particularly with transcripts. Audio recordings are fairly common. If people would like to hear the actual audio that's not too hard to get. Written down transcripts pretty obtainable. Video is a little bit rarer and video from the US Supreme Court is absolutely non-existent. That's sort of like the proverbial photograph of Jesus reference question. It's just that thing that everyone thinks exists but doesn't exist. But for the most part I think something will be available online that will help you or your user get started. But the next steps are going to be determined by several factors about the legal action that you're researching. Number one whether you're in federal or state court. Number two whether the court is the trial or the appellate level. And number three how old the proceeding was that you're trying to research. And it's essential with this kind of research to keep your courts and your court system straight. In the United States we have separate but sort of parallel running systems of federal and state courts. The structures are similar most of these jurisdictions involve a lower trial court system and then two levels of appellate courts. An intermediate appellate court and a court of last resort. Not all states have that intermediate appellate court. Sometimes it just goes straight to the court of last resort. And the same kinds of courts are called different things in different jurisdictions. This is where it can get kind of tricky. I've listed the most typical terminology that you'll run across here on the screen. But just to give you one notable variation in the state of New York the supreme court is the trial court for some reason I don't quite know why and the court of appeals is the court of last resort. So you can't really assume what level of court you're dealing with. It's really important to do a little bit of research into your jurisdictions court structure before you start digging in because it'll save you some time and frustration down the line. Okay so let's talk about other background information that you should have from the very beginning ideally. You've probably heard of the 5Ws from journalism school. They're pretty applicable here too. So for the who hopefully you or your patron should know a name or two. Most likely the parties that are involved. Possibly attorneys and judges could be useful in narrowing down the case if your parties have particularly common names. Keep in mind when you're dealing with parties to a lawsuit that sometimes cases will involve multiple sets of parties that get consolidated. Parties might also drop off of a case after a settlement or a dismissal that affects only them and not the other parties. So be prepared when you're doing the research that the formal case name you know plaintiff versus defendant Smith v. Jones whatever might not match your party name exactly but they could still be a party to that case. They're just going to list those two informal name but there may be more parties than that. So don't get thrown by that. Getting a hold of the docket number which is a control number that's assigned to the case by the court will be really really helpful if you can find it. We'll talk about some methods for doing that in a minute. For the what there are a lot of potential documents that your patron might want from a particular legal action and often they won't necessarily know what they want. They'll just want to see what's out there and so they may be using terminology misusing terminology just not sure what is out there for them to look at and when they say they want something from a court case and that might mean something different to them. To me and most legal researchers I would consider that to mean the actual opinion or the order of the court but if they're looking for materials related to the court case they might really want the transcript of someone's testimony or a brief from the appellate court or a particular filing from the trial court like the original complaint to the lawsuit and sometimes in one really memorable poor reference interview that I did someone told me they wanted the transcript of a case so I immediately went into crazy archival digging mode and what they really wanted was the opinion. They thought that was the transcript so you do have to sort out the terminology pretty early on. The when I mentioned earlier kind of a rough time split between recent and historical materials if something is still pending in a trial court or in an appellate court it won't yet have the final opinion that could take years for trials especially cases from the mid to late 90s onward will probably be a little bit easier to get a hold of online not always as we'll talk about and more historical materials may or may not require some serious archival research. The where are we looking for something within a federal or a state court system? If it's federal you'll probably start with the online system PACER, PACER.gov public access to court electronic records for cases within the last 15 or so years. You might need to locate a records and brief set for older materials or even work with the national archives possibly. At the state level appellate cases might be a little bit easier to find than trial materials. Trial level courts you might need to contact the county court clerk for more information. And the why is really up to your patron and it doesn't necessarily matter at the end of the day but it can help you decide what materials might be the best places to start and how far the patron is willing to go. Are they willing to pay for archival research materials? Are they willing to wait weeks for the archives to get back to them with something? How serious are they? What's the audience? If you're working with a high school student on a paper about a Supreme Court case I might give them something different than I would give a law professor here at Duke just to give you some examples. So it's just a consideration to have when you're getting started with this kind of research. So knowing what we're looking for how do we start to gather this information? So the easiest way is if there already is an opinion or an order from the case that you can find somewhere because as you can see from the screen here these will tell you party names, court location, the docket number, judges and attorney information, dates. So in this opinion you can see in blue the parties are the federal government as the plaintiffs and a very large amount of money as the defendant. So that tips you off right there. This is a federal civil forfeiture case that sprung out of a criminal drug conviction. And when this case was filed in a federal trial level court located in North Carolina, that's the green, the Middle District of North Carolina, it was assigned the docket number that you see highlighted in orange. Dates are also helpful. In this case we have the date of the court's opinion in pink May 25th 2006. But I can also tell from the docket number that little O3 that's after the colon that this case was filed three years before in 2003. There's a little date indicator there. So the most important information that I can pull out of this is really the court location and the docket number. Although all of that highlighted material is ultimately somewhat useful in dictating my next steps. And so those are the kinds of things you'll want to look for if you see a court opinion. Those are the things you'll want to pull out. How do you find the court opinion? There are a number of options for searching court opinions. Some of my favorites that are available outside of law schools are these. LexisNexis Academic, many of you probably have access to that and use it as a source for news searching, business searching. It also has a really nice legal research section. It includes case law from federal and state courts. It has pretty broad coverage compared to the free sources that you might find out on the web. Generally their coverage goes back to the first volumes of any published case reporters from federal government and from the states. Google Scholar is another really helpful option to begin your case law research. It has the advantage of being free. It has the disadvantage of some pretty serious date limitations. For the US Supreme Court you can get case law back to 1791, but for the lower federal courts it only goes back to the 1920s. And for state appellate courts it only goes back to 1950. And that information is not super obvious and it's kind of buried in the help screen. So just keeping in mind these dates of coverage limitations when you're searching that it is a really great resource if it covers the time period that you want, but it's just something to watch out for. And that's true for the other free sites that you might encounter like fine law, other repositories of case law on the internet, there might be some date and coverage limitation. So it's important to be aware of that up front. In addition to the date limitations you should also know that these sources tend not to include trial level court opinions or orders with the exception of selected materials from the federal US district courts like that case we were looking at with the very large amount of money, the civil forfeiture case. Trial court orders are generally considered unpublished, not in the sense that they're not written down, but for the purposes of setting precedent and appearing in printed case reporters. Appellate courts here only a tiny fraction of the cases up from the trial courts. That little pyramid is not really to scale, so you can actually read the court labels, but keep in mind it's a very tiny percentage of what could be appealed from the trial courts that actually gets appealed. And the appellate courts although they hear only a small fraction, they generate the vast majority of the published opinions that you're finding in these online services. So if you're not finding a court opinion to work with, it might not be just you, it could be possible that your source doesn't cover the date range you need, or it could mean that the case never went any farther than the trial court. And so your research steps are going to change a little bit. If you aren't able to turn up a court opinion to work with, another good method to gather background information is news searching. New stories almost never tell you the actual formal case name, and I'd be shocked if you get a docket number out of it, maybe legal news sources will give you that, but it will give you specific court, maybe something about the attorneys or the judge and the parties, and the time period. So I'm personally in the habit of going to America's News, the News Bank resource, as a source for small town local papers since about the 1990s. But North Carolina state residents also have access to pro-quest newsstand via the NC Live Consortium, and certainly sites like Google News will also work for you as well in finding stories about particular trials. Legal blogs are another really good source for news about recent or pending legal actions especially, and a good search engine for them that you might not know about is from a legal website called Justia, which has a blog search, although again, web searching should probably also turn those up, but it is nice to have a focus search for legal blogs too. So here's a story about a pending lawsuit that I came across while preparing this webinar. I don't know how many lead-depline fans we have in the house, but I'm sure you've all at least heard of the band and their very famous song, Stairway to Heaven. What you might not know is that they're currently being sued by the family of a deceased musician, and the plaintiffs are alleging that lead-depline stole portions of stairway from their relative. And in this recent story, the band filed an answer to the complaint in this lawsuit last month, which denied all allegations of wrongdoing, but admitted that the band is, quote, exceptionally talented. This joke is really funny if you went to law school, because one of the first things you learn in civil procedure is that the defendant in a lawsuit has to respond to every allegation in a complaint. So you deny what's untrue, you admit what is true paragraph by paragraph, and you just say if you don't know. And since the complaint called the band exceptionally talented while it was accusing them of stealing from the deceased musician, the band got a little bit snarky, and they made it a point to agree. Using the same color coding as before, I've highlighted what this story tells us for background. And you see, we don't get quite as much information as a court opinion would give us, like we saw in the case against the very large amount of money. But we've got some information about the potential parties in blue. We've got the location of the federal court. It says federal up at the top, and it names the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, federal trial court, down at the bottom. And we have a rough time period. We know that they filed an answer a few weeks ago, so we know this is a pretty current pending case. And it's going to be a long time before this gets resolved. So this is enough to get us started. And just to summarize the background gathering process, before we start locating materials for these two cases, background gathering is a really important time-saving step. So try to get as much information as you can about the legal proceeding in order to determine your next steps. At the very least, you need to determine what court you're dealing with. And ideally, if you can get a docket number or a case citation for an opinion, that would be great. If not, a party name should get you started. And so what you do next really depends on what you find out in the background gathering process. I've already told you that recent is kind of a fuzzy divide, but again, just generally around the early 2000s, maybe mid-1990s if you're pretty lucky. That's a good dividing line. My typical approach with the more recent cases is to get a hold of the docket sheet from the court, that list of activity in the case, and use that list to identify what filings that I might like to see download in full text or try and obtain in full text. There's no guarantee, again, that this will be free. In fact, it probably won't be free. And if the case is still pending resolution, keep in mind it could be years before it's actually closed. So depending what your user wants, it might not be available yet if the case is still pending. To locate dockets in the federal system, you'll most likely be dealing with the court's PACER website. The one exception to that is the US Supreme Court, which currently offers filings through its own website and is actually developing its own alternative to PACER, as we speak. For state courts, it's best to start with the court website directly to see what's available. And you might have to contact the court clerk's office if materials aren't available electronically. So we'll walk through all these steps in a few minutes. Let's dispatch the US Supreme Court a little quickly because that's pretty straightforward and it's probably one of the sources that your patrons are especially interested in. Case dockets on the US Supreme Court website can be searched in the site search box at the top right. You can see there's a radio button to choose dockets versus anything. You can also access dockets from the main menu across the center of the screen under case documents. At the bottom left corner of this slide you can see the start of a docket sheet from Obergefell V. Hodges. That's the same sex marriage case whose decision should be announced either at the end of this week or most likely next Monday at the end of the court's term. The court also links to briefs filed in its cases, although they're hosted on the website of the American Bar Association. But the court does provide free access to briefs from parties in the case as well as Amicus Curie, a friend of the court, briefs that are filed by interested third parties. Here's just a sample of the very many briefs in the same sex marriage case of Obergefell. The ABA Preview site actually archives these briefs back to 2003, so it's a pretty easy source to obtain their briefs. For all other federal courts and for relatively recent again, 2000s, maybe mid-90s you'll be starting with Pacer. Anyone can sign up for a Pacer account. It does require an individual username and password but they do want to keep a credit card on file. As you can guess from that, Pacer is not a free service. It's designed by the government to be self-funding. So searching and downloading documents incurs a charge of ten cents per page, although most items if they're exceptionally long, they get capped at a maximum charge of three dollars. There are some exceptions to that like transcript files and very large search results. And you should know that users don't get charged at all on that credit card on file unless their usage exceeds $15 in charges within a single three month billing quarter. I will say, and some of you who have used it may agree, it's pretty easy to rack up charges on Pacer pretty quickly. So we'll talk a little bit about optimum ways to use Pacer here. If you remember our example from earlier, here's a federal case that's recent enough to likely have materials that are available on Pacer. So keep that docket number and the court name in the back of your mind. When you go to Pacer.gov and click find a case sort of in the middle menu there, there's an option to do a search across all Pacer sites in the Pacer case locator service. We'll look at that in a few minutes. Or you can go through individual court websites, which is the screen I'm showing you here. You don't have to log in at this point in Pacer so you can see that right now without an account. As the Supreme Court doesn't participate in Pacer, that link under U.S. Supreme Court goes to their website. Pacer case locator is the search function. All of the other links on this screen are login points for those specific courts. So they'll be a separate login screen for each of the federal courts in Pacer. We were looking at a case in the Middle District of North Carolina. That's where we are sitting. Well, Linda and I are sitting right now. One thing I want to caution people when they are selecting their link on Pacer.gov and I've made this mistake several times. If you're looking for a district court there will be a bankruptcy court with the same name. And if I go back you can see their side-by-side district courts, bankruptcy courts there on the right. And it's very easy to just be scrolling through that quickly and pick the wrong one. And I've done it more than once and that's a quick way to rack up some unnecessary charges. So this is the point when you select the login system where you will be prompted for your username, your password and it will also ask you for a client code. You can leave that part blank but I would say if your library is going to set up a Pacer account that multiple staff members might share, for example, it could be helpful to just stick your initials in so that when you review bills you know that these charges were legitimate. Alright, so we're logged in. We're in the Middle District for North Carolina's Pacer site and we're going to click query to search for our case, that case involving all that money. And as I mentioned before the docket number is incredibly helpful if you have it. So you can enter it exactly as it appears in the court opinion so I've just typed it in as is. Sometimes you'll be able to obtain a docket number in a more abbreviated format. So for example this docket number might appear in some places as 03-00263 and you can type those abbreviated docket numbers into the same case number search box and a little button will appear that says find this case to help you convert it into the full docket number. Either way you do it, you click run query down at the bottom of the screen in order to search for the case. And note the warning up at the top of this search box here that says search results are not subject to the 30 page cap, that $3 cap on Pacer charges. So it's in your best interest to be as specific as possible. Now we've reached the Pacer screen for that case that we were looking at earlier, USA versus all that money. We have a couple options to retrieve the list of documents in the case. So docket report is a little more customizable. You can limit by a specific time period. So if you're only looking for a particular document that was filed at a particular point in time you could just customize it. If you know the number of the document you could say just view a specific document or you could click the history documents to retrieve the full list. If you're dealing with a very long list of proceedings that might be more expensive than docket report. So I tend to go one or the other. I'm a little floppy with it so I'm going to remind myself to be more careful having prepared this webinar. I'm showing both of the options to you here side by side so you can compare. Either one is fine if you want to retrieve a full list of the materials in this case. History slash documents might be a little bit cheaper since it cuts out a long list of the attorneys and the parties in the council. Although if you look under the docket sheet checkboxes you see there's an option to exclude that from the docket report as well. Keep in mind if you leave it in you're going to bloat your result a little bit and that might result in a few extra charges. I did the full one just so you can see from the little slider on the right hand side that I scrolled through quite a bit of party and council information that did bloat my charges a little bit. But eventually as you scroll down you'll get to a list of the filings in this case and they're in chronological order and there are brief little descriptions about what they are. And as I keep going I get to the end eventually and you'll see at the very end is your receipt for this charge that you just incurred in PACER. So the full docket report version costs me $30. You're all worth it. If I had done the history slash documents or excluded the party and attorney information that would have been $30. So little pieces will help you save money. If I wanted to obtain any of those specific documents from the docket report I can click on the hyperlinked numbers that are next to the dates and you'll see a preview of the charge before you download and you must accept that in order to download the document. And I'll caution if you download anything from PACER I highly recommend saving it and or printing it as soon as possible so that you don't have to double back for the same thing later. Even if you download a document sort of back out of the page in your browser and then click back in you could be charged again. And if you go back the next day PACER doesn't remember that you already paid for this document it will charge you again. It's a rather dumb system or maybe it's a really smart system because they figured out a way to make a lot of money and fund themselves about a hundred times over. But just a warning there that you can rack up charges pretty quickly in PACER. So I mentioned before that I always recommend having the docket number before you go into PACER because the search options are pretty limited and they're also not free. The PACER case locator I mentioned before is the in-house search function that they have. And I'm blocking a part of the screen here but I can assure you there are not many options in it. So there's an option to search the case number. I threw the abbreviated docket number from before in here just to show you what it looks like. You can also search party names and the location. So it's pretty limited and this is just the map that pops up. And if I didn't know any better I might say okay well I have this docket number I know it's a federal case from North Carolina just you know any normal user would go let me run a search for this because I can pull it up pretty quickly. And what will happen is if you don't get as specific with the docket number you're going to pull up everything that matches from bankruptcy, from civil, from criminal that has the matching year and case number in that abbreviated docket format. So I got 12 results here and my result was there but I also just racked up 10 more cents to do this search so it wasn't the most efficient way that I could have done it. So definitely again you really want to be as specific as you can be if you don't have your docket number yet though. There is another option for searching federal dockets. I mentioned Justia before as a source for searching legal blogs. They also have a docket search which is really great. It's a free front end search for federal documents that goes back to about 2004. So you can not only search it for free but it will also link you directly into the case on Pacer to access anything that's not available through the Justia interface. I like to use it to confirm my docket number before I incur any charges on Pacer. I try to search here for Led Zeppelin. You could try a search for all difference if you want to search currency and see other cases that are the government suing large amounts of money. You can do that too. It's kind of fun. I had my doubts when I read the case about Led Zeppelin that the party name would actually be Led Zeppelin because typically cases involving music or bands will name the record label and the publishing company and the individual musicians and not the band sort of as an entity that can be sued but hey, this search is free. If I did this search in Pacer and it was wrong it would cost me money but I'm not going to waste anything but time here. And it turned out I actually did get two results for Led Zeppelin and if you notice they both look like the exact same case but they're in different courts. One of them is in the Central District of California. One of them is in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Now if you remember that article I showed you earlier the ABA Journal named the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as the court. So I clicked result number two first because it just seemed like the right thing. It's also the earlier one. So as I scrolled through my Justia search result what's at the top looks very much like what you get on the previous slide here, the sort of case information, the docket number, some very basic information about the case and eventually you get to any available case documents. And so these are documents that have been tagged as free in Pacer. Opinions and orders are not supposed to be subject to the 10 cent a page charge. Justia only lists docket items number 54 and 55 because the judge tagged those as free in Pacer and so they scraped them out. Clearly there are 53 other documents from earlier than that that I'd have to log into Pacer to access. And if you read that last one's description kind of closely you'll see the case has actually been transferred to the Federal Court in California which was our first search result. And if you looked closely at the filing dates it took them a full year just to figure out what court should hear this case. So again you can see how slow it can be when cases are pending. It took a year just to move the case over to the District Court in California. So I went back to my first search result in Justia and found the new docket number for the case. I didn't like that but you can see it listed under case number. And that's now pending in the Central District Court of California. Still a Federal Court located in California. Justia doesn't have any documents that are tagged as free here which is not surprising because it's going to be a while before there's an opinion or an order that will be tagged as free. But they do give me a really quick link at the bottom into the case's Pacer login. So that saves me some time and some search costs in Pacer. And on the right you can see it looks very similar to the Middle District of North Carolina Pacer screen. Different background, that's down not me. But I can still pull up the history and documents to docket report however I choose to do that. And as I scroll through the available documents in Pacer now I come to a new adventure here because I actually have two potential documents that match what I was looking for which if you remember was that snarky answer to the plaintiff's complaint that the band filed calling themselves, yeah we're exceptionally talented. We agree with that. We deny all allegations of copyright infringement but we agree that we're exceptionally talented. So we actually have two potential matches here and they were both filed on the same day. And we don't get a lot of information. The little gray button, the little gray round button there will pop up a description that explains the difference for 10 cents a pop. But it will tell you that number 68 is the answer by the band members. Number 69 is the answer that was filed by the other defendants in the case. So number 68 is what I clicked on here and you can see in the middle of the screen it's an example where the document would have been $3.20 under Pacer charges but they've capped it at $3 because of that charge cap. So that was nice of them. And finally something like $4 and change later, here we are. Notice my suspicion that Led Zeppelin isn't a proper party name, we're right. Because Led Zeppelin is not technically a legal entity that can be sued but the court kind of let that slide with a footnote and we get down to the point where Led Zeppelin, this is a long way to go for a silly joke about civil procedure but there it is and that's how I would have found it if the patron had come to be wanting to read this complaint after hearing about it in the news. There are other services that can help you access Pacer materials more efficiently. Academic law libraries have access to Pacer through a research service called Bloomberg and they won't be able to provide members of the public with access to it since it's by individual password to law school community members under their contracts with law schools but they, librarians at an academic law library might be able to assist you with a one off request. There's also this service called Pacer Pro that's a newer service that allows free case tracking for two cases and some bulk downloads. It does require you to have an existing Pacer password which gets charged searches and for any documents that are not already posted to their archive but they do have an archive of things that have already been downloaded so that's kind of nice and it might be a good option if you have a Pacer password or you know someone who does and is doing this kind of research, something to investigate further and there are premium accounts that have more options than this. Recap, Pacer Backwards is another option for an archive of Pacer documents. This is populated by a browser extension that's available for both Chrome and Firefox and when users of that plug in download Pacer documents they get uploaded to this free archive that's available to all and I've got the link there on the side. Unfortunately none of the case examples I'm using today were posted here but it is a good thing to know about and to encourage people to use and to remember to search. Pacer has its obvious problems but at least it has consistency and unfortunately for state research there's really no such thing and there's no rhyme or reason to what will be available if you're doing this research at the state level. Some things will be posted online for free some things will be fee based, some states won't have anything available online at all and the process is generally the same no matter which state and it started the court's website for available dockets and filings and if you don't get what you need talk to the court clerk's office. Just to give you a few examples of the spectrum you might encounter, this is the New York State Unified Court System. They actually have a pretty nice search across state trial courts that includes civil docket information back to the early 1980s and it includes some filings as well so that can be pretty helpful. It won't get you everything but it will at least get you a good part of the way started. California trial courts need to be accessed through the county government level rather than through a state unified court site. Available materials are linked under this green tab that says online services that's pretty consistent from county to county. I've personally found California to be one of the more difficult states to research as almost nothing is available online for free. You can see an example of the fee schedule here. North Carolina, our lovely home state is another difficult state for trial level resources. Appellate case briefs are actually posted back to the early 2000s on the NC Appellate Courts website. For trial courts you can basically get to calendars of current proceedings on the NC Courts website. So this is another tricky state to do online court research. Historical materials are a little bit easier but we'll come to that in a moment. So state research is definitely a patchwork and there's no guarantee that materials will be easily accessible online but you'll also have these outlying cases where courts will post additional materials outside the usual channels such as audio or video of oral arguments. I've got a few examples here. I recently discovered the Webcast and Transcript page for the New York Court of Appeals which remember is their highest court and they do a really amazing job of posting transcripts, video, PDFs. I mean it's really quite impressive. So you just got to do a little bit of searching. Sometimes you'll come across some pretty amazing stuff. Just to summarize this portion before we move into the more historical research, remember to gather that key background information first. Federal cases you'll be passing PACER or a free alternative to it. U.S. Supreme Court in states you start with court websites. You may need to contact the clerk's office for more information. And sometimes what the clerks will actually do is point you to law schools like mine because I often get calls from researchers who have been pointed to us by the court clerk for more historical materials. So many libraries receive sets of records and briefs for cases from the nearby appellate courts. These are for appellate courts only. Trial level materials for cases which never got appealed, you'll likely need to contact the court or the archives directly. But the background gathering process is largely the same as for more recent cases. Opinions are great if you can find them. And historical court opinions often actually included argument summaries or other lower court case information in the preliminary material that appears before the judge's opinion. So here's an example from the North Carolina Supreme Court in the late 1960s. Swain v. Tillett was the case from Deere County in which the plaintiff was seriously injured by a deer that her neighbors kept on their property. And if you read this in the printed volume of the North Carolina reports or in a commercial legal research database online, you'll first see this five-page summary of what happened to poor Mrs. Swain and their excerpts of testimony from the trial. You can see that the defendants tried to argue that it could have been a wild deer and not the tame one they kept on their property. But Mrs. Swain was pretty sure that she recognized the deer and insisted that a wild deer would have run away instead of attacking. And because this prior history isn't part of the official court's opinion, you actually won't see this part reproduced in Google Scholar, unfortunately. The court's actual opinion begins after the judge's name appears down in the corner, sharp, just as sharp. And so that's a nice summary if you can get ahold of it. But what if you want to dig more deeply into the case materials beyond those excerpts that the case reporter gives you? So it's very likely that a select group of libraries receive these records and briefs sets from the appellate court. And they're basically compiled copies of the documents which were filed at the time. So records and briefs generally include the briefs from each party to the case, as well as at least some of the materials from the lower trial court. And before the internet improved access to unpublished court opinions, this was often the easiest way to obtain trial court opinions or orders. Record sets also generally include transcripts, sometimes full, more often excerpts, and other associated materials like expert reports, things like that. So our law library has a printed set of records and briefs for the North Carolina Supreme Court. And if a researcher was interested, this is what they would find in the record for the Swain v. Tillett case. There's a complaint filed by Mrs. Swain, the answer given by Mrs. Tillett, testimony from a number of witnesses, and a few other documents. And they don't show up here, this is just the table of contents to the record, but there will also be briefs from each side that are contained. The lower court judgment is available here, that's from the trial court in Dare County. You won't find this in Google Scholar or even in the legal research databases that we have in law schools. Remember those are unpublished and can be quite hard to track down in this time period. You can see here that she was awarded a judgment of $5,000 for her injuries in the 1960s. That would be like receiving $35,000 today. So it's easy to see why when you read her testimony in the excerpts here, you can see this testimony, she really did a number on her plaintiff, and she was actually in her 70s at the time of the attack. So it's kind of horrifying to read what happened to her. A little more testimony just to give you an example. This witness's testimony was excluded from the jury. You can see where they send the jury out of the room and there are objections. And ultimately the North Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new trial because the jury didn't get a chance to hear this witness say that she had recently then by a wild deer. So it's sort of contradicted what the plaintiff was saying that a wild deer would never have attacked, only a tame deer would attack. And you might encounter records and briefs in a few different formats. So we have print, microfilm depending on time period. There's also digital access to a few. Generally you'll see fuller transcripts and microforms since there's more room for them to reproduce it. But any of these will be really helpful if you can find them. And how do you find them? There is a book that was published in 1999 that attempted to create a union list of holdings. I've found that it's already pretty out of date. But it can be a good starting point to identify who might have record sets from a particular court. WorldCat's also helpful but be aware that a lot of these record sets have catalog or supplied titles. The ones in the little square brackets. So they sometimes are a little tricky to track down. Usually a search for the name of the court records briefs will find something. And WorldCat will also help you locate privately published trial proceedings which were somewhat common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So particularly for notorious trials, there were often privately published books of what was happening in the courtroom. There are some subscription databases which provide access to court records and briefs including for the US Supreme Court, New York, California. These might be available at your closest academic law library. Some academic law libraries are also working, this is pretty exciting, to digitize their print or microfilm records and brief sets. So these are just a few recent examples of projects going on for Virginia by the Washington and Lee Law Library, Florida by Florida State University, and locally UNC Chapel Hills Law Library is working on North Carolina records and briefs. So they're not all available online just yet but there are a number of entities working toward that and that's pretty exciting. Just to bring all of these different threads together, because there are some similarities you can see in the types of research that we're doing no matter the time period, the key background information is the same whether you're researching recent or historical case materials. In both situations, newspaper accounts can be really invaluable resources. In some cases they might be the most accessible sources of information for your patron. It's really important to keep in mind when you're looking at records and briefs these are essentially collections of legal arguments and they're not going to read like an episode of law and order. Sometimes they're very dense, they can be very technical. News articles might actually be the best coverage in some cases because they'll explain it much more clearly what's going on in the trial. Another thing to keep in mind that there's no real uniformity in what's available and how the online systems work aside from PACER for federal courts. State systems are a real patchwork. Some private entities are attempting to provide online access through subscription databases. Some of the schools are working to digitize their collections but at this point there's just no comprehensive access to everything just yet. It'll be a long time I'd say. Getting help, you can kind of go to the same types of people no matter what time period you're researching. The court clerk's office where the case was filed can be really helpful in advising where the older materials will be kept or what would be available to you for a more recent case. For every state but Alaska there's a law school that you can choose from to talk to their library. Like my library they probably get these questions all the time and might even have a research guide on their website about how to do it like my library does. And the National or State Archives might also be your last stop for something that's particularly difficult to find. In which case again there'll be some fees and it might take a little bit longer to get a hold of something but if you're really serious about obtaining it that's where you're going to end up. And that's often where we end up when we're doing this kind of research because once an appellate court publishes an opinion it sets legal precedent for whatever point that case makes. So legal researchers tend to be less interested in the follow-up with the individuals involved than they are inciting that case to stand for a particular legal point. So for that reason it's very common for the trail of a case that you're researching to go completely dead after an appellate court opinion because like in maybe till it it's been sent back down to the trial court for more work and then the trial court's opinion if there is one is unpublished or at this point the parties might have settled out of court. Did Mrs. Swain ever get her $5,000? I actually can't tell you, I'm sorry to say I can't tell you what happened after the North Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new trial. I would have to go to the State Archives to root through the case files for that information. I did talk to the court clerk out in Dare County and they confirmed they don't have anything earlier than 1987 in Dare County so I'd have to work with the State Archives and I just did not. Time got away from me. I really wanted to be able to give you the answer but this is as far as I could get. I can tell you thanks to new searching and a really fabulous digitized newspaper database in Dare County that Mrs. Swain despite her terrible injuries in her early 70s from that crazy deer that her neighbors allegedly kept on their property did live to be 100 years old. So she definitely survived well beyond that attack. If you're particularly eagle-eyed or sitting close enough to the screen out there you might notice that her daughter Oma Pearl is a tillet and yes that's the same branch of the tillet family that's a branch of the same tillet family that she ended up suing as you learn in the court records and briefs. So just little fun facts that you discover when you do this kind of case research. Now Linda has promised me that if I come back and do another webinar hopefully not two years from now I can conclude this story. So I will hope to do that and get myself to the State Archives and be able to tell you what exactly happened. In the meantime I am very happy to take your questions either now or later and I'd also be happy to hear from anyone out there from a court library or a county library or a law school library who has other suggestions or anything I might have missed. Can records and briefs be requested via ILL if a patron knows exactly what they need? I would say it varies. I know that I have definitely requested items through interlibrary loan from other libraries and people have definitely requested them from us. So I think most places would be reluctant to circulate the entire bound volume but certainly it's possible to obtain copies. And usually probably the best approach would be if you suspect the library has something is to shoot them an email or give them a call, give them the case information and ask for the table of contents to the record. And then you could probably pick and choose what documents. So like the one I showed this one here earlier where you could see an actual list and I only want the testimony of Oma Pearl Tillett who did testify for her mother that would be a way to do it pretty efficiently.