I uploaded something to RECAP but it didn't seem to work. Help?
The RECAP extensions gather legal information from PACER as you browse the PACER website. This does not always work smoothly, so this page helps you to debug issues you may have.
These problems tend to fall into two buckets:
- Did the item get uploaded?
- Did the item get processed?
Did the item get uploaded?
The extension works by identifying pages and PDFs to upload to CourtListener while avoiding pages that are not applicable to the extension's purpose. As a result, sometimes the extension does not recognize that a page or PDF should be uploaded and does not send it to CourtListener. Of course, if we don't get the page, we don't have it, so the first thing to check is: Did the item get uploaded?
The way to check this is:
Ensure that notifications are enabled for the extension:
Load a page or PDF in the PACER website
Note if the upload notification pops up (this can take a few moments, but no longer than a minute or two).
If you do not see a notification saying that an item was "Uploaded to the RECAP Archive" that means we did not get it.
Did the item get processed?
After receiving an HTML page or PDF, we process it in CourtListener.
For HTML we attempt to:
- Identify what case it is part of
- Convert HTML into structured data
- Merge the data into our database
For PDFs we attempt to:
- Identify what case it is part of and what docket entry it belongs to
- Merge the item into our database
- Extract the contents of the PDF
These processes usually only take a few moments, so if you do not see an item within a brief period of time, that may mean processing failed.
For HTML, this mainly happens when we encounter a format we do not recognize due to a court changing something in their PACER system. If they change their HTML, our parsers can fail.
For PDFs, this mainly happens when we receive a document before we receive its docket or docket entry metadata. This is a dead end for us because we can't add a PDF to a docket we don't have and we can't add it properly if we don't have the docket entry it's associated with. To fix this, add the docket for the uploaded PDF, and the PDF will be automatically associated with it without needing to be re-uploaded.
The last major reason this can happen is due to a longstanding bug in multi-defendant criminal cases.
mike