Push back against the growing blanket prohibition against allowing companies to capture “free look” PDFs

[mlissner]

Describe the solution you'd like Instead, help these companies and the firms that rely on them capture the PDFs securely.

Additional context Several courts have begun banning this incredibly useful technique.

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For reference, the following email was sent by the Northern District of Texas on 12/12/2019:

POLICY PROHIBITING THIRD-PARTY RESELLERS AS SECONDARY RECIPIENTS IN NDTX ECF USER ACCOUNTS

The number of third-party service providers that collect and organize federal court case filings has risen sharply during the past two years. These providers may ask ECF filers to designate them as secondary recipients of the Notice of Electronic Filing (NEF) for documents filed in ECF or to share ECF or PACER account credentials to enable the download and management of documents on the filer’s behalf. In some instances, the third-party service provider may also resell or republish the case documents and information they obtain.

As we have outlined in previous e-mails to bar members, designating a third-party service provider as a secondary recipient of NEFs will give sealed docket text access to the provider, which may be harmful to parties in the case if posted publicly through reselling or republishing of this information. Because of this significant risk, the court, after obtaining feedback from the court advisory committee, has authorized the clerk to remove third-party service providers as secondary recipients in ECF when they are identified. The clerk will begin to remove third-party service providers as secondary recipients from ECF users’ accounts on January 2, 2020. Any third-party service providers identified thereafter will be regularly removed.