# RECAP / CourtListener > Free access to tens of millions of federal court documents. Browser extension archives PACER purchases and shares them publicly through CourtListener. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/recap-free-law **Official site:** https://free.law/recap **Category:** newsgathering **Also covers:** newsgathering, newsgathering ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** Open-source, nonprofit-operated, privacy-focused by design. The extension only activates on PACER/CourtListener domains and does not track users. Sealed documents are architecturally excluded — RECAP cannot access ECF magic links. Strong institutional commitment to open access, backed by 15+ years of operation, major foundation funding, and government adoption (1,000+ verified government users). The main risk is operational: your PACER activity feeds a public archive, which could reveal reporting interests to anyone monitoring new additions. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — independent security review pending - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-02 - **Last agent-verified:** 2026-04-02 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Journalists covering courts, lawyers, researchers, civic technologists, and anyone who needs federal court documents without paying PACER's per-page fees. RECAP auto-archives documents you access on PACER; CourtListener provides the searchable database with 10+ million opinions, the world's largest oral argument audio collection (1M+ minutes), and a database of thousands of federal and state judges. ## Editorial take PACER charges $0.10 per page for public records created by a publicly funded judiciary. Free Law Project built RECAP to fix that. Install the extension, and every PACER document you buy gets archived to CourtListener for anyone to find for free. The RECAP Archive now holds tens of millions of documents, hundreds of millions of docket entries, and nearly every federal case. CourtListener's v4 API crossed 100 million requests by mid-2025. The 2025 launch of RECAP Search Alerts — essentially Google Alerts for federal courts — is a genuine breakthrough for beat reporters: get notified the moment a person or organization appears in a new filing. Free Law Project won the 2025 AWS Imagine Grant ($150K) and the 2025 American Legal Technology Award for AI. They are building a Litigant Portal using Amazon Bedrock for AI-assisted court navigation, with pilot launches planned for September 2026. This is essential infrastructure for journalism and civic accountability. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Searching federal court records without PACER fees. Monitoring cases and people through docket alerts and RECAP Search Alerts. Building a growing public archive of court documents as you research. Accessing case law, oral arguments, judicial financial disclosures, and judge profiles. Bulk data access via API for data journalism projects. **Not for:** State court records — RECAP covers federal courts only. Documents nobody has accessed through RECAP yet still require a PACER account (RECAP then archives them for others). The RECAP archive is broad but not complete; for guaranteed coverage of a specific filing, go to PACER directly. Alert system cannot handle high-volume queries (e.g., a search returning 200+ results/day will be rejected). ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free. RECAP is a browser extension. CourtListener is a free search engine and API. PACER itself charges $0.10/page (capped at $3/document), but fees are waived if you accrue $30 or less per quarter. RECAP shares documents so others don't pay again. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** yes - **Data jurisdiction:** United States. Archive also mirrored to the Internet Archive for permanent preservation. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** Free Law Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The RECAP extension only activates on PACER and CourtListener domains — it does not track browsing elsewhere. Your PACER purchases are anonymously uploaded to the public archive. CourtListener accounts require email only. No data selling, no advertising, no user tracking. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Documents you access on PACER with RECAP installed will be publicly archived. If you are researching sensitive dockets or building a story you don't want to telegraph, disable the extension temporarily. RECAP cannot access sealed documents — it lacks login credentials for ECF 'magic links' and never touches restricted content. On rare occasions, documents that should have been sealed by the court are inadvertently uploaded; Free Law Project works with courts to remove them quickly. If you use an ECF account instead of a PACER account, log in carefully — RECAP encourages PACER-only logins to avoid any risk of sharing restricted filings. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Free Law Project (501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded 2010) - **Funding model:** Nonprofit. Grants (Knight Foundation, Open Society Foundations, AWS Imagine Grant), individual donations, and revenue from bulk data services to legal tech companies. - **Business model:** 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Free for all individual users. Revenue from bulk data licensing to legal tech companies and law firms. Won the 2025 AWS Imagine Grant ($150K unrestricted + AWS credits) for the Litigant Portal project. Reached 1,000 verified government users on CourtListener by 2025. - **Open source:** yes - **Built for journalism:** no **Known issues:** RECAP archive coverage depends entirely on what other users have purchased — if nobody has bought a specific document, it won't be in the archive. Alert system rejects broad queries that would generate 200+ results per day; narrowing by court or date range helps but doesn't always resolve it. Occasionally, improperly unsealed documents appear in the archive before courts fix their own errors; Free Law Project removes these but the window can expose sensitive information. The extension adds slight latency to PACER page loads while checking the archive. No mobile browser support — extension requires desktop Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. CourtListener search can lag behind real-time PACER filings by hours or days depending on contribution patterns. --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/recap-free-law Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology