Why does this docket response lack full docket entry descriptions?

[mlissner]

Looking at a docket on PACER, I see lengthy descriptions for every docket entry, but looking in RECAP I see shorter descriptions. What's up with that?

Here's an example of a case that has short descriptions:

https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v3/docket-entries/?docket=17248433

[mlissner]

Background

Every docket entry from PACER has two kinds of descriptions, which we call the short description and the long (or full) description. The long description is what you typically see on the docket itself. It usually contains the filer's name, a description of the document, some dates, etc. Sometimes it can even be an entire order from a judge that's just written up as a minute entry (these can get quite long).

The short description is less visible in PACER itself, but appears in a handful of places:

• RSS feeds
• The Docket History Report
• The attachment page you see when you click to download a document that has attachments
• And surely other places too

Answer

The reason that many docket entries lack full descriptions is because of how we get our data. Often, we're able to get the short description and have done so, but haven't been able to get the long description — yet.

If you look at our coverage page, you'll see that it lists a number of sources of PACER data. One of the biggest sources we have is from PACER RSS feeds. These are a free source of PACER data, but they come with the caveat that they only provide the short description of docket entries. That's unfortunate, but in the case where we have not gotten long descriptions for a docket entry from another of our sources, the short descriptions at least provide the metadata for a given document, and allow for the creation of the skeleton of a docket.

Solution

The only way to solve this is to somehow purchase the full description. This can be done via our fetch API by buying the whole docket or by buying just the one docket entry you're interested in. To get the docket, you might do something like this (untested):

curl -X POST \
  --data 'request_type=1' \
  --data 'pacer_username=xxx' \
  --data 'pacer_password=yyy' \
  --data 'docket=17248433' \
  --header 'Authorization: Token zzz' \
  https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v3/recap-fetch/

Check out the Fetch API docs for more details about other options.

Epilogue

One other thing to mention here is that you can usually get the short descriptions for free by getting the attachment page for a docket entry. As above, you can do that via our Fetch API with something like this (untested):

curl -X POST \
    --data 'request_type=3' \
    --data 'pacer_username=xxx' \
    --data 'pacer_password=yyy' \
    --data 'recap_document=SOME_DOCUMENT_NUMBER_HERE' \
    --header 'Authorization: Token zzz' \
    https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v3/recap-fetch/