Most of the time when I see the word “bot” I think of Russian trolls influencing the U.S. election. But not this time! USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath has created an automatic Twitter bot that follows selected U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Courts of Appeal, and Federal District Court cases of note and posts documents from new docket entries to Twitter.

In its documentation, the bot is described as follows:

The bot uses PACER RSS feeds to gather the latest filings from 74 U.S. District Courts and five federal courts of appeals and stores the docket entries in a database. It matches new filings against a preselected list of major cases, scrapes matching documents from PACER, uploads them to a DocumentCloud project and posts the results on Twitter.

You must have a PACER account in order to access the documents – we do! So if you want the latest filing on United States v. AT&T and Time Warner, or any other U.S. court case you’re watching, let us know if we can help. There may be a fee for retrieving documents.

And follow Big Cases on Twitter for up-to-date notification.

h/t to Internet for Lawyers.

 

Please note: The library will be closing early on Thursday, April 17th at 11:00AM for a special event.  Regular library service will resume Tuesday, April 22nd at 8:30AM.

The Winnipeg Court Complex will be closed April 18th and April 21st. Manitoba Law Library staff will not be onsite during the holiday, but will be available by email on Monday, April 21st. Regular library service will resume Tuesday, April 22nd at 8:30AM.

Please note: The Winnipeg Law Courts will be closed April 18th and April 21st. The Library is closed Friday. Manitoba Law Library staff will be available by email on Monday, April 21st. Regular library service will resume Tuesday, April 22nd at 8:30AM.