By Illustration: The Verge
If you’ve ever followed a lawsuit or criminal trial in the US, you may have come across the work of the Free Law Project. Its Recap database is one of the best ways to freely access documents typically stored in the paywalled Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. And one of its cleverest uses of Recap is the Big Cases Bot: an automated account on X / Twitter and Mastodon that checks for updates to the most important cases in US federal courts, automatically downloads the associated files to the Recap database, and posts an update linking to them.
The Big Cases Bot has been an excellent resource for The Verge over the years — I check it, and so do other writers and editors. But by design, it’s a general-interest feed…