Every lawyer practicing in federal court knows the benefits of the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system, quick and easy (?) access to case and docket information from Federal Appellate, District and Bankruptcy courts. However, the system is not without its faults. One of which we get at least one call per month about concerns the viewing of PACER documents downloaded with Firefox.
As most readers will note, Firefox is gaining large ground against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with Firefox jumping to a 20% market share while Explorer dropped to 69% for the first time since 1998. While most users find Firefox superior, it handles downloads from PACER in an awkward manner by saving the file as “show_temp.pl” which will not open.
The solution? Change the extension by renaming the file to “Document Name.pdf”. Suddenly your operating system will be able to view the file! As for why Firefox seems to handle PACER downloads in this manner has to do with the Perl script PACER is using to push the file to your browser (don’t worry, you won’t be tested on that). The point is that once you know how to deal with it, it’ s not all that bad.