The Firm That Made PACER
Actually Usable

PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, and it is the system through which anyone can, in theory, read the filings in a U.S. federal court case. In practice PACER charges you roughly ten cents a page to look at documents that are public records, produced by a public court, funded by public money. It is the kind of arrangement that sounds like a satirical premise and is instead simply how the system works. If you are a litigator at a large firm, you and your colleagues generate an astonishing volume of these ten-cent transactions, and then somebody - often an expensive somebody - manually downloads each filing, renames it, tags it, and drops it into the firm's document system.

PacerPro's insight, circa 2014, was that essentially none of that should be done by a human. Founded in 2011 by Gavin McGrane - a commercial-litigation attorney who spent seven years doing the work before deciding to fix the tooling - and later joined in the founding story by Anna McGrane and Executive Chairman Paul G. Locklin, the company launched as a thin "overlay" on PACER. It made searching faster, distribution cheaper, and the whole miserable process a little less miserable. That was the wedge. The business is what grew behind it.

What grew behind it is the part that matters. Because once you are the layer that sits between the courts and the firm, you are in a genuinely valuable position: you can watch for new filings in real time, grab the PDF the moment it is docketed, extract the metadata, name the file the way the firm wants it named, and deliver it straight into the firm's knowledge systems - all before a single billable minute is spent on clerical work. PacerPro says its service is now "the standard for integrating federal court data into workflow and knowledge systems for BigLaw and leading litigation boutiques." The company reports that roughly 47% of Am Law 100 firms use its products. That is a remarkable number for a tool most people outside litigation have never heard of.

If you run a litigation practice, PacerPro is the difference between paying trained professionals to babysit dockets and having that work simply happen. New filing hits the court? The PDF is fetched, named to your firm's convention, tagged with its metadata, and dropped into your document management system before anyone asks. Need to search across federal courts? The overlay is faster and cheaper than raw PACER. Working a matter that spans state and federal venues? StatePro pulls the state side into the same clean pipeline.

The knock-on effects are the real product. Cleaner data feeds knowledge management, e-discovery, and risk workflows. Consistent naming means documents are findable years later. And because filings arrive in real time, teams learn about developments in their cases when they happen rather than when someone next logs in to check. It is, to put it plainly, court data that behaves like modern software instead of a government website from 1998.

Legal technology, as a category, has a recurring temptation: to promise that software will do the lawyering. The demos are impressive, the headlines are big, and the actual value delivered is often smaller than advertised, because the hard part of law is judgment and judgment resists automation. PacerPro took the opposite bet. It went after the part of legal work that is unambiguously mechanical - the fetching, naming, tagging, and filing of documents - and it went after it thoroughly. There is no judgment involved in renaming a PDF. There is only the question of whether a person or a machine does it, and how reliably.

This is why the company sits in a crowded but distinct niche. It shares the court-data neighborhood with Docket Alarm, UniCourt, Trellis, Bloomberg Law's docket tools, Lex Machina, and the nonprofit RECAP archive, but most of those are built around search and analytics - helping you find and study filings. PacerPro's center of gravity is workflow: getting the right filing to the right place automatically. That is a less glamorous claim than "we will analyze all of litigation," and it is also a much easier thing to actually deliver, which is roughly the point. A tool that quietly works is harder to displace than a tool that dazzles.