johnhawkinson
commented
1 year ago The other half of this is that when there are Really Big Cases, they have expedited appeals, and those who care care about those appeals often long before the USCA Case Number event is ever docketed in the district court. I'm honestly not sure if this less-common-but-more-important case is a higher priority than the common boring case.
For instance, today in Alliance, the case number event was docketed in the district court around noon Central time, but the Fifth Circuit had assigned the case number around 10am Central, and the first emergency motion was filed at 12:53pm Central time. So the dots did line up, but they might not have, and the docketing of the event in the district court is a manual and somewhat uncertain process.
Yet another wrinkle is that in the First Circuit (and possibly only the First Circuit?), the district court event with the docket number is available days or weeks in advance of the docket being accessible at the Circuit (obviously the number is assigned, but appellate CMECF pretends its not)
For the appeals courts that have RSS feeds, just looking to see if there is a matching district court case when we get a new entry in a previously non-existent appellate court might be sufficient. But of course, that misses the Fifth Circuit which is likely to remain the veritable hotbed of federal appellate litigation for the rest of the Biden administration (the 11th circuit does have an RSS feed, tho).
Also, as to the Fifth Circuit in particular, to the extent there is interest in polling docket numbers (which has some no-charge endpoints that incidentally allow this), I did run across this doc this morning, https://www.baffc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Cacyes-Answers-to-Questions-regarding-assignment-of-cases-to-judges.pdf:
- What happens when an appeal is received in your court? Our court receives electronic notice when a notice of appeal is filed in the district court. We receive notice of agency appeals by mail, or when attorneys file the appeal through Pay.gov. After receiving notice, we open the appeal and assign a case number that includes the calendar year filed and five digits that indicate the originating court or case type.
Northern Texas Cases are 10000 series (such as 19-10001) Southern Texas (Houston Only) Cases are 20000 series (such as 19-20001) Louisiana Cases are 30000 series (such as 19-30001) Southern Texas (Other than Houston), Eastern Texas Cases are 40000 series (such as 19-40001) Western Texas Cases are 50000 series (such as 19-50001) Mississippi and agency cases are 60000 series cases (such as 19-60001) Death Penalty cases are 7000 series cases (such as 10-70001
If BCB is following a case and then that case is appealed, there will be a notice posted to the lower court case that says something like:
See:
We should parse these and then automatically follow the appeal. We'll need a table mapping the district to circuit court rulings, and we'll need to somehow notice when things go to CAFC, which handles patent cases (lovely).
This one may take a while to get right. An 80% solution might be OK.