David Perla, Law Technology News – “An uproar recently erupted in the legal community that raises the question of where the market should expect to rely on the government—and where it should look to private industry. The catalyst for the recent debate was when decades’ worth of public records from five federal courts—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second, Seventh, and Eleventh circuits and the Federal Circuit, as well as the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California—were summarily taken offline with less than a paragraph of notice to the public. Notably, some of the removed dockets were from recent cases in the Federal Circuit, where many pivotal patent issues are decided. In announcing upgrades to the federal government’s official warehouse of court dockets and documents—Case Management/Electronic Case File Public Access to Court Electronic Records system (aka PACER) —the U.S. Administrative Office noted, “As a result of these architectural changes, the locally developed legacy case management systems in the five courts … are now incompatible with PACER; therefore, the judiciary is no longer able to provide electronic access to the closed cases on those systems.” Law firms, academics and journalists were apoplectic. Should they be?”