Domain Expert – Legal (PACER / Federal Court Records)

To qualify you must use PACER (and federal court dockets / CM/ECF) regularly, weekly or more, as a working part of your job, with 2+ years of professional federal-litigation experience as a litigation paralegal, docket/court clerk, legal-research librarian, or litigator.

PACER knowledge we require

Reading cases & dockets

• Reading a docket sheet fluently: parties, attorneys, assigned judge, filed/terminated dates, case status

• Docket entries: interpreting terse entry text, following cross-referenced entries, and tracing procedural posture (what was filed, how the judge ruled, how the case ended)

• Decoding case numbers (division, year, case type, judge initials) and recognizing what they tell you

Searching & finding

• PACER Case Locator (nationwide index) vs. searching inside a specific court's CM/ECF, and the limits of each

• Party-name search and its traps: name variants, corporate suffixes, "et al.", d/b/a, subsidiaries, misspellings

• Filtering by court, date range, case type, and Nature of Suit; targeted retrieval instead of blind browsing

Court structure & jurisdiction

• The federal court landscape: district, appellate (circuit), and bankruptcy courts, and knowing which court a case lives in

• Case relationships: consolidated cases, MDL lead vs. member cases, transfers, and district-to-appeal linkage

Case types & classification

• Civil / criminal / bankruptcy case types; Nature of Suit codes; cause of action; party roles (plaintiff, defendant, appellant/appellee, debtor/creditor, trustee)

Documents, records & workflow

• Document types: complaint, answer, motion, brief, order, judgment, exhibit, and what each represents

• What is and is not retrievable: sealed cases, restricted/redacted documents, minute entries with no document, and the privacy rules behind them

• App workflow surfaces: saved searches, saved cases, and batch download jobs for large result sets

What you'll do

• Review and QA AI-agent rollouts: work through completed agent runs and judge whether the agent's answer is correct against the actual docket, right case, right court, right parties, right outcome/status, right document

• Identify failure modes: pinpoint where and why an agent succeeds too easily or fails wrongly, and flag tasks that are too easy or solvable without actually using PACER

• Improve realism and difficulty: refine the task prompt and the seeded world so tasks reflect authentic federal docket research and are genuinely hard for a capable agent

• Update grading guidance for accuracy: sharpen how answers are graded so correct answers pass and wrong ones fail, including gating failures (wrong case identified, misread procedural posture, missed member case, or use of a sealed/restricted document that should be off-limits)

• Catch plausible-but-wrong answers that a non-expert reviewer would let slide

Requirements

• Frequent hands-on PACER / CM/ECF use for federal docket research in your current or recent role, weekly or more

• 2+ years in federal litigation support: litigation paralegal, docket/court clerk, legal-research librarian, or litigator

• Can read a federal docket on sight: decode a case number, trace procedural posture, tell open vs. terminated, recognize case types and Nature of Suit

• Reflexive with PACER search mechanics and the name-variant traps that cause missed cases

• Sound judgment on what a correct, complete answer looks like, and the confidence to mark a plausible answer wrong

• Bonus: bankruptcy docket experience; complex/multidistrict litigation; hands-on experience across multiple courts (not just one firm's home district)

• Note: a J.D. and bar admission are welcome but not required; experienced litigation paralegals and docket specialists are the primary pool