I sent this link to a friend of mine who's a corporate lawyer for a large international firm - her first response was "PACER sucks so hard right now; maybe this will make it better", followed a few minutes later with "this is pretty cool, but I think IT would flip if I installed it."<p>I think these comments were pretty indicative of what the RECAP people need to do in order to make this really successful. My friend is exactly the kind of person they would love to use this plugin - she has an essentially unlimited PACER budget, and pulls 20 or so obscure cases a day out of it. She wants to use it, but firm policy stands in her way.<p>Based on this, maybe the following would help its expansion:<p>- For the lawyers, add some functionality to it. As opposed to making it just a plug-in that copies data to the Internet Archive, make it a mini PACER-specific browsing environment, something like ScribeFire or Firebug. I don't know what PACER is missing (she says there's no built-in <i>Find</i>, for example), but I find it very hard to believe that if you pointed a decent UX designer at PACER for a few days they could find some things that could be fixed by a plug-in. Add some value, and get PACER's daily users (the line attorneys) on-side.<p>- For the firm, have someone whose job it is to bring large firms on board - don't just rely on viral marketing to penetrate a large organization like an international firm. Explain how it will only make lawyers more productive, how it will cost them nothing, how no identifying data will leak out about their searches (and provide an external legal & technological opinion to back this up), and how they can consider it as an aspect of their pro-bono work. Add some value from the firm's perspective, so the have a reason to spend some money (in the form of time) to getting this installed.<p>- For the firm's IT department, produce a guide to the source code (so they can understand it if they want to), and a report from an external consultant that did a code review of it that explains how there's no security bugs or possibility of extra charging.<p>Getting small firms to use this will provide some benefit, but I suspect the real win would come if a few big US firms (on the scale of Clifford Chance/Linklaters/Jones Day) added this to their official corporate desktop images. These are the guys that have unlimited PACER accounts, and that access somewhat more obscure cases that smaller firms wouldn't need access to (and would probably already find in the index).
What about sites like <a href="http://openjurist.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openjurist.org/</a> ?
Disclaimer: I've currently working on improving this site
If they have problems getting enough users to participate, accounts could be created and associated with the plug-in, then donations to a foundation could fund reimbursements of say, $0.04 per document.