Pacer stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, and it can be a great way to find out if a person you are considering for a line of credit has filed for bankruptcy in the past, or if a business you are considering becoming affiliated with has a past bankruptcy history. Anyone can register for an account with PACER, and is used widely by people in the legal professions, educators, businesses and private citizens. Before march of 2010 PACER waived all charges for use that were less than ten dollars in a year, but after March 2010 the rules changed and PACER now waives any charges that are under the amount of ten dollars in a quarter. All users of this system now receive a quarterly statement showing how much they used PACER, and how much their charges were for the usage. It also clearly shows if charges were waived.
There is one big drawback to using PACER and that is you must register with them through the mail before you will be allowed to access the database. It will take close to ten days for your registration confirmation to arrive to you, you can however choose to have your bills and notifications sent paperless to your email rather than through the mail. There is another drawback in the fact that the program was designed for the legal profession so understanding the written content can be challenging at times. Pacer has the case information on all the district bankruptcy filings and on all the file documents of the appellate courts. They are available to the public as soon as they are filed electronically, and new files are added to the database on a nightly basis. PACER is not free but it will only cost you eight cents per page to access the information, and for cases that had records that contained more than thirty pages they set a cap that no case could cost more than $2.40. If during a quarter you do not use ten dollars worth of page viewing the charges are waived and you pay nothing, so for the occasional viewer this system is basically free of charge.