[a3d6g2f7]

I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?

Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.

Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?

Pardon my ignorance.

(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)

[law]

What I want to do with the data is largely irrelevant; I care more about being free to analyze this data--data that belongs to the public.

But to answer your question more precisely, I'm interested in identifying trends in the courts with respect to litigated issues. It'd be interesting to determine whether certain pre-trial motions have a higher propensity to be granted/denied in a particular court, before a particular judge, etc. Additionally, I'm interested in tracking cases on which attorneys and law firms typically rely when writing their briefs or other documents submitted to the court.