The New Jersey court system allows the
public to search for civil cases, but only if either the docket number or a
party’s name is known. For example, if I
already know that Kelly Morgan filed a “whistleblower” (i.e. a Conscientious
Employee Protection Act (CEPA)) case
against the Pleasantville Board of Education, I can go the state courts’ web site, search
on Morgan’s name and learn that the case’s docket number is ATL-L-006652-10 and
other information about the case. (For
instructions on how to use this
on-line search feature, see my blog entry here.)
But what if I didn’t know a party’s name
or docket number? Suppose, instead, that
I wanted a list of all the “whistleblower” cases filed in a given county during
a given year? This type of information
is not available from the court system unless someone pays the State hundreds
of dollars in programming fees to have a custom report prepared.
Fortunately, New Jersey Foundation for Open Government (NJFOG),
as a public service, recently paid the court system $710 to obtain two custom
reports containing docket information on civil cases filed from January 1, 2002
to May 14, 2012. After obtaining these
electronic records, we combined them, removed the duplicates and converted them
into a fixed-width text file that contains basic docket information on over
260,000 Superior Court Law Division Civil cases. A zip file file containing the complete text files can be downloaded for free here. (Be patient, because the file is large. Also read the “README.TXT” file first to understand which files contain which information.)
By using basic text editing and sorting
software (I use EditPlus and CMSort)
you can learn things like the number of whistleblower cases filed in Atlantic
County in 2011 (there were 24 of them) and see that the cities of Atlantic City
and Pleasantville and the Township of Galloway were named as defendants in some
of them. To learn more about any
specific case, you can search the docket number on the State’s site. For example, you’ll learn that Koltouris
Konstadinos’ whistleblower case against Galloway (Docket ATL-L-002795-11)
settled in mediation on April 3, 2012. (You can also use Microsoft Excel, but I find working with text files much faster.)
While this information is very useful,
it is not complete. Unfortunately, the court system periodically “archives”
some of its cases, and when a case is archived, it is removed from the reports
that we paid $710 for. In order to get
data from the archived cases, we would need to purchase a “PAC0502” report for
an additional $1,325. The PAC0502
report, while prohibitively expensive, would also be difficult to manipulate
into useable data. According to a March
14, 2012 e-mail from Elisabeth Ann Strom, Esq., Chief of the Superior Court
Clerk’s Office (Voice: 609-292-5293 - e-mail):
The [PAC0502] report
is not available for paper copies due to its immense size (one year’s worth
could be at least one million pages),
nor can this report be sorted by date range or docket order. This report is sorted by archive date. Also, this report contains all different
types of docket cases intermingled together.
In addition, because this database is for archived cases, it could
contain multiple copies of the same case if it had been reopened, closed and
archived again within the same year. I
have been also informed that this report is only an electronic docket,
containing only enough data in the archive database to re-establish a case if
necessary. It does not contain the
entire caseload of information for each case.
So, in sum, the file that we’ve provided
is a nearly complete listing for recent cases (e.g. only 59 of the 93,759 cases
filed in 2011 have been archived) but as the cases get older, there is a
greater chance of them being archived and not available in the file we’ve
provided.
In conclusion, we hope that this
information will help journalists and the general public to better identify and
track court cases that are of interest.
We also believe that NJFOG’s experience in gathering this information
illustrates how antiquated, expensive and user-unfriendly New Jersey’s civil
case database is. Compare New Jersey’s
system to the federal court’s Pacer system.
While it has its flaws, the Pacer system allows account holders to search court
records in a variety of ways and to actually download PDF versions of court
filings (for a modest cost per page).