Appellate Court Electronic Services (“ACES”)
ACES (also known as Electronic Dissemination of Opinions System - EDOS) is used by the 4th and 9th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, an electronic bulletin-board system that attorneys can access to view recent federal appellate court decisions and other court information such as published slip opinions, court oral argument calendars, court rules, notices and press releases.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (“PACER”)
PACER is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, and from the U.S. Party/Case Index. PACER does not offer information on state or county courts. Currently, most court systems must be dialed directly using communication software (such as ProComm Plus, pcAnywhere, or Hyper-terminal) and a modem, but the judiciary is moving toward providing case information on the Internet through PACER-Net sites. Electronic access is available to most courts by registering with the PACER Service Center, the judiciary’s centralized registration, billing and technical support center.

The government created PACER in 1992 to allow individual lawyers to track their cases through these courts. Each federal court controls its own computer system and information database, therefore, available information varies among jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction will have a different modem number. Accessing and querying information from each service is comparable; however, the format and content of information provided may differ slightly. 

Typically, the PACER system offers electronic access to case dockets to retrieve information such as:

• a listing of all parties and participants including judges, attorneys, and trustees
• a compilation of case-related information such as cause of action, nature of suit, and dollar demand
• a chronology of dates of case events entered in the case record
• a claims registry
• a listing of new cases each day in the bankruptcy court
• appellate court opinions
• judgments or case status
• types of documents filed for certain cases

There are several different programs running within the PACER system, depending upon which court you dial into. Even within the same program, different courts have different versions, each with its own peculiarities. There are similarities, but each court has its own system set up in a slightly different way. Thus, the public that dials into one system and is used to its interface, may have to learn another interface with another court system.

The United States Congress has given the Judicial Conference of the United States, the judicial governing body of the U.S. Federal Courts, authority to impose user fees for electronic access to case information. All registered agencies or individuals will be charged the fee of $.60 per minute. PACER is available for some courts on the Internet in a web-based format, with a user fee of $.07 per viewed page. Users are billed on a quarterly basis for transactions. Users can enter a client code each time they log into PACER to help facilitate managing the costs. The client code appears for each transaction on the quarterly statement. 

For more information regarding the PACER system, dial (800) 676-6856 or (210) 301-6440, visit the PACER web site at http://www.pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/, or write to:

PACER Service Center
P.O. Box 780549
San Antonio, TX 78278-0549
pacer@aottsd.uscourts.gov 

Value-added providers, like CaseStream, CourtExpress, and CourtLink, use PACER to access data and provide enhanced services to users – for an additional fee.