DOJ Will Spend Over $15M on Legal Research This Year
December 2, 2009
Documents provided this week by the U.S. Department of Justice under a Freedom of Information Act request show that it will spend more than $15 million for legal research this year. Of that, it will pay more than $5 million to each of the major legal research providers, WestLaw and LexisNexis, and pay $4 million for access to the federal judiciary’s PACER system. The documents were obtained by Carl Malamud at Public.Resource.Org, an organization devoted to publishing government documents in the public domain, pursuant to FOIA requests he filed in May with various federal agencies. He asked for documents detailing amounts spent on PACER and with commercial legal information providers for access to federal court documents and other primary legal materials. The DOJ, responding on its own behalf as well as on behalf of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Office of the Solicitor General, provided Malamud with 152 pages of documents. The documents reveal many details about the DOJ’s contracts for legal research. For use of PACER, the DOJ was due to pay the U.S. courts $4 million on Nov. 13. This payment would provide access to PACER in 2010 for all DOJ employees. The cost to the DOJ…