OpenBCM - Pacer Services

CM/ECF and PACER is both the life blood and the bane of most Trustee offices. It it the critical portal through which all documents and information flow between the Attorneys, Courts and Trustees. This, we all know. The challenge, of course is that using it requires a person to log in and do the work.

Originating in the Trustwin System, a system was developed to automate connecting to the Pacer system not to download images, but to simply run the two reports that let a Trustee know that they have new cases, and new claims to enter. From there that system would create shell cases and claims in the Trustwin System based upon those reports. It ran once a day, as that was deemed 'often enough', and since the Courts at the time really were not sure about allowing these processes, it was low enough volume that there would be no impact upon them.

When it came time to reevaluate that whole system and think in broader strokes, much like everything else, there was room for improvement, and an opportunity to break from the tightly integrated platform to a solution that any Trustee, regardless of vendor could use regardless of their Case Management platform.

The Server Service

With the launch of the OpenBCM version of Pacer Services, there are a couple of different pieces in play. It starts with a simple web service where original concept of grabbing those reports from Pacer to provide the shells of newly assigned cases, and claims for a Trustee office. This process is scheduled to run multiple times per day ( by default, 4 times during the workday ) on the server side. The results are then available to the office according to the schedule that is set up with their end.

Catch21 Integration

For an additional fee, and option exists where an office can enable Catch21 integration. That integration is an even more powerful solution. One that enables Catch21 to process the Case Petitions from pdf, and return over 200 distinct data elements from those PDF's that can then be used to augment the Case creation process in the office. This process can take as much as 24 hours to turn around, but the client side processing is built to handle this, providing a method to take the resulting data elements and back filling the original case shell data. All of this, with an additional follow up element that will let us and Catch21 both see how user entered data changes according to the automated data so that together we can continue to enhance the data quality of this process.

The Interchange Format(s)

In the past, this whole process ran locally and stashed the results into the local database in a group of tables that had a Pacer prefix on them. This implementation eschews that for a far more flexible and easy to handle .json file for each result. This makes it easy to handle evolving data elements that can be returned from the pacer processes, and provides a far more accessible data format for any vendor to consume.

The Client Side Service

This is the part that takes all of the parts that happened to create the data files from the Pacer website, as well as the optional results from the Catch21 data, and brings them into your Trustee system. While Trustwin is absolutely the first vendor platform to be supported, the implementation is done such that at any time, we can work with any vendor ( or give them the tools ) to process these files into their system.

It is a simple service application that is already running on Windows, Linux or MacOS environments in a ready to go form.

Start Your Onboarding Today

Contact us at sales@openbcm.com