State Court Records Are a Billion-Dollar Opportunity No One’s Building

Somebody should build this.

That's the thought that hit me after reading the EFF's latest piece on Hacker News about why court records should be free. The article makes a solid case against PACER's pay-per-page model. But as someone who spends way too much time digging into civic tech data, I kept thinking: they're missing the bigger story.

PACER is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem—the one nobody's tackling at scale—is state court records. We track user-submitted problems on PainSignal, and the numbers tell a clear story.

Right now we're monitoring 47 problems related to federal court access, with an average severity of 4.2 out of 5. That's bad. But state courts? We have 83 problems logged, averaging 3.9 severity. The volume alone suggests a much larger, more fragmented pain point. And here's the kicker: 90% of those state-level submissions cite cost as the primary barrier. We're talking per-document fees ranging from $0.10 to $5.00, with no consistency across jurisdictions.

The EFF article focuses on PACER's $0.10-per-page fee and the judiciary's cozy relationship with that revenue stream. They're right to call it out. But state systems are worse because there's no single target. Each county runs its own portal, sets its own fees, and hides behind different login systems. A journalist researching a story might need to pay five different counties for the same type of document. A startup doing background checks has to integrate with dozens of incompatible APIs—if they exist at all.

This is where it gets interesting for builders. The federal PACER system is a monolith. Reforming it requires an act of Congress, basically. State courts, on the other hand, are a collection of hundreds of independent systems, each with its own quirk. That fragmentation is exactly the kind of opportunity that suits a lean, scrappy team. Think of it as RECAP—the Free Law Project's browser extension that crowdsources PACER documents—but for every state.

I'm not the first to notice this. The Free Law Project's CourtListener has collected over a billion pages of opinions, but docket sheets and filings at the state level remain largely inaccessible. What's missing is a unified aggregator that pulls from state portals, normalizes the data, and offers it at a flat, low cost—or free, subsidized by enterprise users like law firms and legal tech companies.

The market is real. Law firms spend thousands annually piecing together state records. Legal aid organizations routinely struggle to access documents they need to represent clients. And with the rise of AI training data, there's a growing hunger for clean, structured court records—something that currently exists only in scattered, paywalled formats.

Our data backs this up. The problem titled "Access to public legal documents" consistently scores high on our platform. Users describe paywalls as "the primary barrier" and express frustration that something so fundamental isn't digitized uniformly. One user wrote: "I can see my state's weather data for free but need to pay $2 to see a speeding ticket filing."

A state court aggregator wouldn't just be a public good—it would be a viable business. Charge API access for large firms, keep basic search free. Offer bulk downloads for research institutions. Add a RECAP-like browser extension that lets users donate documents back to the commons. The pieces are all there.

If I were a vibe coder looking for a meaningful project, this would be it. It's not another to-do app or AI wrapper. It's a civic infrastructure play with a clear revenue model and genuine demand. The EFF has done the hard work of keeping the conversation alive at the federal level. Now someone needs to go state by state.

The data says the pain is there. The technology is mature enough. The timing has never been better. Somebody should build this.