PACER is the system for searching and accessing federal court records.

The site includes video tutorials

and a user manual.

You must create an account in order to log in. This requires providing a credit card (because PACER charges you 10 cents a page to view certain documents). However, PACER won’t bother billing you if your charges are less than $15 per quarterly billing cycle.

First, I’ll search all the courts for an entity’s name. (It could be a person or an institution.)

Let’s see what cases involve VCU.

VCU is trying to collect money from people who’ve declared bankruptcy.

VCU is among the parties bringing criminal charges against someone (in this case, for health insurance fraud).

First, click on ‘Case Summary.’

Then, you might explore the documents that have been filed in the case.

Watch this number. Keep it below $15 to avoid getting billed.

When you click on ‘View Document,’

here’s what you’ll see. In your browser, save or print this as a PDF.

If you want to look at a specific court …

You’ll find a lot of civil cases, filed by people who say they got hurt at VCU or were discriminated against.

… like the federal appeals court in Richmond

Get a list of recent opinions.

After skimming the opinion, you may need to see the original filings to understand the case.

The numbers below link to documents.

You can also find statistics on the number of case filings.

Here’s what the spreadsheet looks like in Excel. To find trends, you’d download and combine several of the files.