Over $730,000 Spent by Law Libraries in PACER Fees Last Year

Stanford Law Library Deputy Director Erika Wayne reports on a survey she conducted on law library PACER expenses in 2008. Apparently the survey was limited to law firm and academic law libraries but the findings still show that over $730,000 was spent on PACER fees. Summary stats are provided below.

2008 Law Library PACER Expenses
Type of Law Library	Average Spending	Total Expenses	No. of Survey Responses
Law Firm Libraries	$13,068.48	$692,629.30	58
Academic Law Libraries	$656.74	$38,090.92	66

Wayne observes that there is a substantial difference in PACER expenses for public and private academic law libraries: "The public law school libraries spent almost half as much as the private law school libraries." From the findings:

2008 Academic Law Library PACER Expenses
Type of Academic Law Library	Average Spending	No. of Survey Responses
Public	$457.08	32
Private	$856.40	34

See Wayne's Legal Research Plus blog for an excellent analysis of the survey findings. By the way, the Improve PACER Petition, she and others launched only needs about 150 more signatures to reach its 1,000 goal. Have you signed it? There are 730,000-plus good reasons to do so. [JH]