Media
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Description
PlainSite Recycler reduces costs by re-publishing court records so anyone can view or download them for free. PlainSite Recycler makes public court records public. Federal court records are technically open to everyone, but PACER, the government's court records system, charges by the page to view them, and many state and county court portals are just as hard to search or access from the outside. PlainSite Recycler quietly fixes that. As you use PACER—or one of dozens of supported state and county court websites—the way you normally would, the extension notices which dockets and documents you're viewing and automatically republishes them, for free, on PlainSite, so that the next person who needs that same case or document doesn't have to pay for it or dig through a confusing portal to find it. You don't have to do anything differently. Browse PACER, search a state court's case lookup site, open a document you already have a right to see... Recycler works in the background, capturing only what you're already looking at, using your own existing access. It never asks for your court login credentials, never accesses anything beyond the specific court systems it supports, and never touches your browsing on any other site. HOW IT WORKS Docket capture: when you open or refresh a case in a supported court system, Recycler reads the docket entries the court already sent to your browser—the same information you're looking at on screen—and uploads it to PlainSite. Document capture: when you view or download a PDF (a docket entry, an order, a filing), Recycler captures a copy and uploads it too, so it becomes freely available afterward. On federal courts it works transparently even for PACER's paid, one-time "billing receipt" downloads and one-time-use appellate "magic link" documents that would otherwise be gone the moment you click them. Bulk free documents: on specific state and county systems that mark certain filings as free, you can optionally have Recycler automatically fetch every free document linked from a docket, so nothing is missed. Smart deduplication: Recycler keeps track of what's already been captured so it doesn't waste bandwidth — yours or the court's — re-uploading the same document twice. Status at a glance: the toolbar icon shows whether you're on a supported court site, whether it's actively capturing, or whether something needs your attention (for example, if PACER billing receipts are turned off in your account, which Recycler needs to reliably detect paid document opens). Activity log: click the toolbar icon to see a running log of what's recently been captured and uploaded, with a direct link to view it on PlainSite. SUPPORTED COURT SYSTEMS Recycler supports the federal PACER/CM-ECF system across every circuit and district, the newer federal Appellate Case Management System (ACMS), and the U.S. Supreme Court's website. Beyond the federal courts, it supports state and county court portals across more than two dozen states and territories—including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Idaho, Texas, New Mexico, Maine, Illinois, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—including widely used court-technology platforms like Tyler Technologies' Odyssey portals and Journal Technologies' portals, which power case lookup systems in dozens of jurisdictions nationwide. New court systems are added regularly, and Recycler can be extended to support additional ones without requiring a browser extension update. WHY THIS MATTERS Court records are public records. Federal laws and policies and the principle behind PACER itself say so, but a per-page fee and a maze of inconsistent, unsearchable local court websites make "public" a technicality for most people. Journalists, researchers, opposing parties in litigation, and ordinary citizens trying to understand a case that affects them all hit the same wall: paying repeatedly for the same public document, or giving up. Recycler doesn't scrape courts in bulk or work around anyone's login—it simply makes sure that once one person has legitimately viewed a public record, everyone else can see it for free from then on, hosted permanently on PlainSite. PRIVACY Recycler only activates on the specific court websites it's built to support: the federal courts and the state/county portals listed on the PlainSite Recycler home page. It does not run on, read, or interact with any other website you visit. It never asks for or transmits your court account username or password. The only things it sends to PlainSite are the case and document data the court itself already displayed to you in your browser, plus your own extension settings (like your notification and filename preferences). Recycler does not track your browsing outside of supported court sites, does not include advertising or third-party trackers, and does not sell data of any kind. ABOUT PLAINSITE PlainSite is a legal and financial research platform developed by Think Computer Corporation, covering court cases, opinions, entities, and more. PlainSite Recycler is one of the ways PlainSite is kept up to date, powered by everyday users like you, one filing at a time.