DocketBird is one of the world's largest repositories of federal and state court cases and documents. We have millions of cases and documents in our database, including nearly every pending federal case and hundreds of thousands of state court cases. DocketBird is trusted by hundreds of law firms, consulting companies, and investment firms to provide up-to-the-minute updates in civil, criminal, bankruptcy, and appellate cases.

Usually, DocketBird charges a fee to access its services. However, DocketBird has decided to make its services 100% free for law school libraries, university libraries, and public libraries.

Below is a description of how you can get DocketBird set up for your library, and what your patrons can do with their accounts.

To get started, email us at sales@docketbird.com. We can give you a live demo of DocketBird, and can assist you in creating your library's master account.

After your master account has been created, you can then proceed to create accounts for your library patrons. There are two types of accounts:

1. Shared Patron Account. This account can be shared by multiple individuals. It can access only free materials on DocketBird; it cannot incur any costs. Libraries typically use Shared Patron accounts at public terminals. You can create only one Shared Patron account.

2. Individual Patron Account. These accounts are intended to be used by a single individual. When you create the account, you can either (i) limit the user's access to only free materials; or (ii) provide PACER credentials for the user, so that the user can access paid materials. When you create this account, an email invitation will be sent to the individual user. Note that public libraries may not want to create any of these accounts, because users can incur fees.

To add new accounts, log in to DocketBird, and then hover your mouse over your name in the upper-right hand corner of your screen. Then, click on "Accounts," and then "Settings." Finally, click on "Manage Users." Alternatively, you can just click this link: https://www.docketbird.com/manage_users.

DocketBird is easy to use. The basic free activities that patrons will want to perform on DocketBird include (i) finding specific federal cases; (ii) searching DocketBird's entire repository for particular terms; and (iii) viewing docket sheets and documents that DocketBird already has in its repository.

Patrons with Individual Patron Accounts can perform various payment-required activities in addition to those listed above. For example, those individuals can refresh docket sheets, download documents from the Court that may not already exist on DocketBird, "follow" cases of interest, and set up alerts for newly filed cases matching certain criteria. Each of these activities will incur the typical PACER fees of 10 cents per page. Of course, if your library does not want to incur any PACER fees, then you can simply not set up Individual Patron Accounts.

Once you've set up DocketBird and are happy with the service it provides to your patrons, you can continue using it for free. We have only one requirement: we ask that you provide a link to DocketBird from a prominent page on your library's website. When we help you set up your free account, we would be happy to provide you with more information about this requirement.