WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - Lawyers who took on the federal government's system for charging fees for court documents will take close to $25 million for their efforts.
D.C. federal judge Paul Friedman on March 20 entered final approval of a $100 million settlement that addresses gripes the federal government used fees from its PACER system to fund non-PACER matters.
PACER charges users at a $.10 per page rate, which was challenged by plaintiff National Veterans Legal Service Program and others. The settlement will return more than $100 million to hundreds of thousands of PACER users.
The long-running case was pursued by Deepak Gupta and others at Gupta Wessler, plus William Narwold and attorneys at Motley Rice.
"Before reaching a settlement in this unique case, Class Counsel impressively litigated for nearly eight years," Judge Friedman wrote.
"They took the case from an untested idea, to a certified class action, to a win on partial summary judgment, to a successful appeal.
"They negotiated with the federal government to deliver to the class much of the recovery the class sought - although, as with any compromise, not all of it."
PACER is operated by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) and charges up to 10 cents per page for access to digital court records, which are otherwise public records.
PACER long has been criticized for charging more than the program costs to operate, with overruns - estimated at $145 million each year - spent on other Judiciary Department programs. That has been for years the PACER norm, despite the federal E‑Government Act of 2002 that says PACER fees are to be "a charge for services rendered."
In 2016, three nonprofit groups filed a class action against the federal government, alleging that PACER's lucrative fee model operates in clear violation of federal law. The National Veterans Legal Services Program, National Consumer Law Center and the Alliance for Justice cited the E-Government Act's fee authorization of "only to the extent necessary" as reimbursement for actual costs to run the program.
"Instead of complying with the law, the AO has used excess PACER fees to cover the costs of unrelated projects - ranging from audio systems to flat screens for jurors - at the expense of public access," the original lawsuit said.
In March of 2018, the federal district court for the District of Columbia found that AO's use of PACER fees had been proper for some services but not others. As a result, the district court found the federal government liable for excess fees collected beyond the scope of the E-Government Act.
An appeal followed, which was won by the plaintiffs.