As COVID-19 has increased the need for remote computing, more attorneys will need to work with the federal court CM/ECF (PACER) system using an iPad. If you are away from your computer and the CM/ECF system sends you an email to alert you that a new document was filed in the federal district court in a case that you are handling, you will often want to see the document right away without waiting until you return to your computer. Unfortunately, currently, the links do not always work in Safari on an iPad. Sometimes you can click the document number and a PDF file will open as it should. But other times, it doesn't work. I was recently asked on Twitter if I knew of a workaround. I do have one, but it is not perfect. I'll share what I'm currently doing, but if someone out there has a better solution, let me know and I'll update this post to share with everyone. [UPDATE: I did receive two great suggestions, and both are below.]
The problem
When you are enrolled as counsel of record in a federal court case and a new document is filed, the CM/ECF system sends an email to you to inform you that the new document was filed. Typically, you can click the document number link to view/download a copy of the document in question.
But currently, when you click that link on an iPad (or an iPhone), instead of a PDF file you will instead see a graphic of the first page of the document, something like this:
If the document is only one-page long, perhaps you can live with this because you are viewing the entire document. But if you wanted to save a copy of the PDF into your document management system, you are out of luck. And if it is a multi-page document such as a brief, then just seeing the first page can be useless.
To make matters worse, the PACER system only gives you one free look at a document. Thus, if you are unsuccessful in accessing the PDF file on your iPad and you later use a computer to try to click on a link in the same email, you will be prompted to login so that you are charged to download the document. Ugh.
Secondary email for CM/ECF communications
Before I discuss my solution, my first piece of advice is to associate more than one email address with your CM/ECF account. This way, even if you have already utilized the free look associated with an email to your primary email account, you can then find the similar email that was sent to your secondary email account and you can use the free look associated with that secondary account. In other words, you are giving yourself two free looks instead of one.
Login to the CM/ECF page associated with a federal district court. At the top of the screen, click on Utilities. Then, under Your Account, click on Maintain Your Email.
This will bring you to a screen where you can create one or more secondary email addresses. Some folks already use that to send an email to their secretary/paralegal at the same time that an email is sent to the attorney. You can still do that, but you can add another secondary email address for yourself. I'm not aware of any limit on the number of secondary email addresses that you can associate with an account.
Partial workaround
=UPDATE 3/16/2020 11am=
Before discussing the workaround that I originally shared in this post, I want to share a suggestion I received in response to this post from Boston attorney Jake Walker. I like his solution even better than my original solution.
When you tap the link in the email and Safari opens to an image of the first page of the document instead of the PDF file, hold your finger on that image of the first page for a few seconds. This will open the share menu with three options: Share, Add to Photos, and Copy. Tap on copy. When you do this, you are copying a URL (not the document). Next, go to the address part of Safari and paste that URL and tap go. This will often load the PDF version of the document, giving you exactly what you wanted in the first place. This workaround hasn't worked for me every time, but it has worked for me more than once, so it is probably just as good of a solution as what I describe below, and it is faster because it doesn't involve using a third-party app (PDF Expert).
=UPDATE 3/16/2020 9pm=
California Judge Jack Lucky provides another tip. When you hold down your finger on the image of the first page, when the image starts to lift off the page and you see that share menu with the three options, keep your finger down on the screen and drag it up to the top. You can let go when you see a green plus sign, and you can do so either in the address bar or in the tab bar. If you let go on the address bar, the PDF file will replace the image of the first page. If you let go in the tab bar, you will open up a new tab with the PDF file.
This tip works with federal court systems, and also works with some of the California court systems too. Great tip, Your Honor!
=ORIGINAL POST=
Here is what I have figured out as a partial workaround to successfully open the PDF file associated with an email from the CM/ECF system. This workaround uses PDF Expert (my review), so you have to have that app installed.
Instead of tapping on the document link in the email, hold your finger down on the document link for a second. This will trigger a pop-up menu with some options. One of the options is Copy Link. Tap on Copy Link quickly, before the page loads in the preview window.
Next, open a blank page in Safari. In the address bar, paste the link that you have just copied, but DO NOT hit tap the GO button yet. Instead, navigate your cursor to the beginning of the URL, and just before the "https://" part you need to type pdfe. This tells the iPad that instead of opening up the URL using Safari, you want to open up the URL using PDF Expert.
The iPad will ask you to confirm that you want to open the link in PDF Expert. Tap Open to confirm. Next, one of two things will happen. When this workaround works, you will see the PDF file that you wanted n PDF Expert. You can view the document, save it to a folder, export it to another app, etc.
When this workaround doesn't work, you will see a screen indicating that you need to login to PACER to pay to view the document. At this point, the free view associated with the email will no longer work — even though you never got a chance to use that free view — and that is why I hope that you also had a copy sent to a secondary email address so that you can try again.
This is an imperfect solution, but it has worked for me enough times that I am comfortable recommending it. But my hope is that either Apple will fix Safari or the federal government will fix CM/ECF so that this problem goes away. In the meantime, if you have a better solution, please let me know and I will share it here.
And remember, regardless of this workaround, it is always nice to have a secondary email address for your CM/ECF account. If you try to view a document on your iPad, you can try again (using the email sent to the secondary email address) on a computer, where hopefully everything will work well. Otherwise, you can always access the document using PACER, but you will have to pay to do so. Or you can access PACER documents using another service. For example, you can use the Dockets feature on Westlaw to access any PACER document, and you may or may not incur an additional charge for that depending upon your billing arrangement.