Web-linked info preserved

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—the circuit that serves Nevada—has adopted new rules to deal with a modern problem.

Since the advent of the internet, some citations in filings with the court have been by web address. Of course, web links are moving targets and court filings are supposed to be forever.

“Since 2008, court librarians in the Ninth Circuit have been tracking citations to online resources and preserving original documents and/or web pages as Adobe PDF files,” the court said in a statement. “Although stored on the court website, www.ca9.uscourts.gov/library/webcites, the availability of these files is not readily apparent to legal researchers.”

Up to now, in other words, the court’s staff has been creating PDF copies of material cited by lawyers in their filings and posting them online on a separate webpage against the possibility that the web links will go dead. Now, however, they will be adding those copies to the court docket instead of that separate location so they can be found more easily.

Asked why the court doesn’t require attorneys to include the PDFs with their filings instead of having court staff generate them, assistant court executive David Madden said, “That could be the next step, but for now we are making them more easily accessible.”