My recent post titled Impact of PACER Changes: it is not Good News lamented the fact that a great trove of court filings had been removed from PACER, but now some clarification is in order. Indeed, the court dockets for the affected courts are still currently not available, however, according to the PACER Website the bulk of the affected courts dockets did not include the filings anyway.

Here is the latest update regarding the courts filing for the affected courts:

“In virtually all instances, the only information electronically available in the legacy systems was docket sheets, not the case file itself. There has not been any change or interruption to PACER access to the documents in the more than 42 million cases residing in the courts’ CM/ECF system and no case documents, opinions, or filings have been lost or destroyed.”

Further PACER states that the missing records will be fully restored by the end of October 2014. That is good news indeed. In the interim, other than contacting the court directly there are some options available. Coverage of this content on Lexis CourtLink and Westlaw dockets has apparently not been affected, as both have retained previous versions of affected dockets as well as many of the underlying court filings which they already had in their respective systems. Of course, these services require subscriptions and are more costly than PACER.

Full details from the PACER announcement is available here.