BAILII vs RECAP

BAILII is a free web service for finding British and Irish case law, legislation, European case law, and other legal materials. Readers can search databases by keyword or browse by date and A–Z title list. Search help covers basic, advanced, multidatabase, citation, date, and Boolean searches, including AND, OR, and NOT. LawCite supports searching by citation, parties, court, jurisdiction, article title, author, year, and cases or legislation considered. Collections include case law, legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports, and other law-related material. The help section explains printing and downloading documents. BAILII says access requires no password and places no cookies on users’ machines. Its stated beneficiaries include pro bono organisations, neighbourhood law centres, students, and users in developing countries; legal practitioners and educators are also among its audiences. OpenLaw makes selected leading judgments and reports available for legal education. BAILII does not offer an API or permit bulk downloads, and says large-scale downloading may lead to blocked access. It invites commercial users and educational institutions to make annual donations, without specifying an amount.

RECAP is a collection of tools for working with PACER, the system for accessing records from U.S. federal courts. Its browser extension adds purchased PACER documents to the searchable RECAP Archive, where documents contributed by others are available without charge. The archive contains tens of millions of documents, including scanned PDF pages. Users can follow cases for email alerts about new filings and save searches to hear when new matches appear in PACER holdings. Attorneys can route PACER notices to a personal CourtListener notification address so RECAP can process the notices and contribute cases and filings. The archive is also offered through an API and as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers. Webhooks can connect website events with actions in other systems, and the maker describes a PACER-to-Google-Drive connector demo. The extension says it does not access PACER credentials or transmit information to third parties, while noting it uploads federal records to CourtListener and sends CourtListener queries about requested records. RECAP is free to use; PACER may still charge for purchased documents. Paid access is listed from $10/user/mo.