Help Us Turn Three.

And that was just in the last month. Whether it’s a national media story or local reporting, if it involves federal court records, you likely read it here first. It’s been a recurring theme for us. We break news. We report it before everyone else. And many times, we report stories that wouldn’t have ever been reported without us. 

We’ll see how our national election plays out today. But, be it emergency court orders extending the voting times or arrests of individuals harassing poll workers, election days tend to be a particularly busy moment for the Judicial Branch. That’s why having experienced reporters who understand the U.S. Court system is so important. Today, we’ve created a landing page that will be updated throughout the day with all the most pertinent federal court filings related to the election. 

As of this week, Court Watch has been in existence for two years. We’ve already achieved a level of impact that would be the envy of most news startups. But in order to keep this going, we need your help. Let’s be as transparent as humanly possible. Court Watch will have to cease to exist if we don’t get more paid subscribers soon. That is the explicit ask in this piece. We’ll explain why shortly, but first, let’s talk about the last year.

Our Approach.

We eat, sleep, and breathe the federal court docket system. As former Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman recently noted, Court Watch is “the no shit, uncontested expert” when it comes to federal court filings. In the last 365 days, we’ve produced more than 120 separate reporting pieces. That’s twice as many as we did last year. 

The pace of keeping up with a weekly newsletter and on average two original news reporting pieces a week became daunting. So we made the decision to continue to stay in the red and bring on board our first Court Watch Reporter Fellow, Peter Beck, for the summer. Peter is a senior at Davidson College studying political science. He previously interned with the Federal Defender’s Office for South Carolina, the Charleston County Public Defender’s Office, and Radley Balko’s The Watch. We liked his summer reporting so much that we extended the fellowship for the fall. We like watching cub reporters become seasoned writers. In his short time with us, Peter has broken more national stories before he graduated college than most reporters will in their entire career. 

We report for Court Watch at odd hours. Between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., we’re grinding on the dockets. 8 p.m. to midnight-ish is our sweet spot. We prepare weekday stories on the weekends. We wrote the first draft of this subscriber appeal at 5:47 a.m. We’ve never been supporters of sleep, seeing it as something best saved for death. For things that pop during the normal workday, Peter writes copy quicker than any reporter we’ve worked with. 

Court Watch was born out of a need for mental floss. Our editor-in-chief, Seamus Hughes, spends his professional life looking at the worst of society. He works at NCITE with some of the smartest academic minds in the world but, anyone in his field will tell you, if you spend your life researching Americans who support neo-Nazis or ISIS, you need to build in mental breaks or the topic area consumes you. Court Watch provides an opportunity to cleanse the proverbial palate of misogynistic men and conspiracy laden miscreants.

Every week, we help out dozens of reporters from big and small media outlets with their stories. We do it because we like a good story and as more and more news deserts keep popping up around the country, we think it’s our duty to lighten the load of already overworked journalists. And when the U.S. Courts system breaks from the flood of internet traffic of a high-profile case, we provide court records for free to the journalists and the public at large.

Original Reporting and Collaboration with Other News Organizations

We continued our fruitful partnership with the 404 Media. We’ve produced dozens of stories together combining their reporting power with our quirky court records skills. This year, we added publishing partnerships with Rolling Stone and Forbes. 

Our highest read piece was about a Hawaii man accused of leading an online neo-nazi child exploitation ring, followed closely by our uncovering of arrests of two individuals accused of running a massive online hacking platform, a man alleged to have masqueraded as a fake FBI agent, and a Russian who somehow got on an international flight without a plane ticket. Our story last week with 404 Media about a man accused of changing the peanut allergy information on Disney menus was picked up by damn near every major and local news outlet. 

Sometimes, our other original reporting gets cited by those same news organizations. Other times, they conveniently forget to do so. A review of our analytics this year reveals that hyperlinks back to us by other news organizations don’t actually drive traffic or subscribers. Fervent subscribers who share our stories do. Either way, the stories get out, and that’s good enough for us. 

Behind the Curtain.

We are big believers in transparency in the courts so it’s incumbent on us to be as open as possible with our readers. We haven’t taken a salary from Court Watch for our entire two years and our subscribers’ payments go right back into our reporting. It’s a money-losing operation, not Messenger-level-money-losing but money-losing nonetheless.

At our one year anniversary, we had 5,164 subscribers, of which 140 people paid for it. At our two year anniversary, we have 8,705 subscribers and 336 paid subscribers. That paid number jumped dramatically (60 new) in the last month when the Washington Post & the LATimes opinion sections decided to be agnostic and one of our friends at 404 Media thankfully put their finger on our subscriber scale. 

Last year, we averaged 50,000 monthly hits on our website. This year, it was 90,000. We get most of our subscribers from word of mouth. Substack’s app brought in less than ten percent of our subscriber base. We had no media roll-out party or major newspaper coverage when we launched. Our growth has been driven by our reporting and people like you telling others.

In 2024, so far, the fees involved in pulling court records related to our stories were $6,105.30. We paid more than $4,000 dollars for freelance reporters, including a story about a Philadelphia arts school going belly up and quite a few more that will hit your inbox this month. We experimented with putting clearly marked sponsorship ads in our newsletter but over the course of months, that resulted in about 60 dollars worth of click through returns. We also didn’t like that an ad would be directly above an arrest of an angry man threatening to kill an election worker. The whole vibe felt off so we made the decision to end those types of sponsorships.  

We used hundreds of dollars for domain hosting, domain registration, and court monitoring reporting tools. We spent a considerable amount of money on credit card subscriber processing fees. Having learned the lessons of Jelly Roll, we hired a trademark processing company to protect our mark. That turned out to be a fool's errand because the words Court Watch were too common. We thank the pro-bono 2Ls at the University of Maryland Baltimore’s IP law clinic for examining the trademark office submission after our original trademark denial to look for other angles. They found none. Taxes ate up a comical amount of our subscriber funding. We’ve been exploring tax scams in the federal docket to emulate, alas, they all seem to be not particularly clever sovereign citizen rackets. As such, we pay to Uncle Sam what is Uncle Sam’s, and to the PACER fee gods, what is theirs. 

Let’s be as transparent as humanly possible. Court Watch will have to end if we don’t get more paid subscribers. We can’t keep this reporting going without our free subscribers transitioning to paid subscribers and we refuse to sacrifice quality for a bottom line. We wouldn’t hate to be compensated for our reporting. But for at least this year, if we simply break even, we’ll continue to report. Barring that, we made an admirable run but it’ll be time to cut bait. We never had the financial runway of a Messenger. Joanna Coles is too busy writing about her frenemies at NYC cocktail parties and destroying previously solid news organizations to be our white knight. We looked but there’s no British editor available to save us because all the other news organizations have already scooped them up. 

It’s just us. And You. 

Impact.

In addition to leading news reporting, we had a policy impact. For months, we reviewed more than forty criminal cases, hours of congressional hearings, thousands of pages of court records including many that have not been reported on previously, and dozens of interviews with individuals tasked with investigating government waste, fraud, and abuse. The result was a comprehensive and exclusive look at a small government office that has saved the taxpayers millions of dollars and was set to be shut down. The reporting spurred a bipartisan group of Senators to step up to try to save it. Staying with Congress, we’re reliably informed that our reporting about the staggering number of social security numbers available in the court dockets spurred congressional oversight. We also interviewed advocates for public access to the courts and those findings have made their way to congressional offices tasked with overseeing the U.S. courts. 

Our reporting this year changed the course of lawsuits and, on more than one occasion, protected the little guy. Dolly Parton dropped a lawsuit (that no one on her team told her she filed) against a small Tennessee business when we asked why. A multi-billion dollar hedge fund owner of Whataburger stopped going after a beloved mom-and-pop restaurant shortly after we inquired about it. And it’s not just civil actions where a little Court Watch sunshine was the best disinfectant. Utah state prosecutors dismissed criminal charges against a National Park Ranger when we asked if they were actually seriously considering trying to win an old-fashioned jurisdictional fight through a questionable felony conviction. 

A quick scan of our subscribers reveals a cross-section of America. Multiple federal judges are subscribers. We have at least one assistant U.S. Attorneys subscriber in every district in America. A representative from every BigLaw firm reads us. Most of the TV anchors who report the news every evening read their news first here in the morning. If you glanced at a national paper this morning, we can safely guarantee at least one of the front page stories was written by a Court Watch subscriber. We have one billionaire subscriber. (editor’s note: though he currently is using the free option for Court Watch.) Maybe he’s simply exploring buying a Substack newspaper. Given rich people’s ‘complexifier’, hopefully not though. 

But while the fancy people are nice to have, us regular folks are what make Court Watch what it is. Every week we get emails from readers around the country with suggestions, tips, and the occasional pushback. We appreciate them all. You all dive into court records with the same passion as we do. But hopefully with other better life-affirming hobbies than us. Either way, we love to see it. 

The Future. 

Two years at this, we think we’re finally figuring out both our voice and publishing cadence for Court Watch. It’s a healthy mix of facts and snark with (hopefully) no partisan spin. Reading Court Watch for the last two years, we trust you have no idea who we will vote for later this morning. That’s the point. There are other places on Substack for political commentary and, we know this may be controversial, but opinion sections of newspapers are also a good place to have opinions. But here, we’re simply reporting what we uncover, regardless of whether it upsets any specific political fractions. Taking a quick look at the paid leaderboard of all of Substack, that decision likely seriously stunts our subscriber growth. We stand by it. 

We like quirky stories that wouldn’t normally get covered, particularly in places in America where there is a deft of reporters still left. We occasionally like to hide massive unreported stories in one sentence of a very long newsletter because we want to reward any reporter who can spot it. For our third year, we’ve got big plans. First, we will continue to publish our weekly roundup of court docket proceedings. It’s how we started Court Watch and we hear repeatedly from our subscribers how much they look forward to our Friday morning email. Second, we’ll be ramping up our original standalone reporting pieces. Third, we are in discussions to expand our media partnerships to get our stories in front of more readers. Finally, we’re moving into more long-form investigations involving court records. 

The Ask.

As we noted in our first year appeal, Court Watch did not launch our site to make money, but we wouldn’t hate it if we at least didn’t lose money. So in case it wasn’t clear yet, here’s our explicit ask:

• If you are in the position to make the switch from a free subscription to paid, we would be immensely grateful. You can support independent journalism that has an impact. As a small incentive, we’re running a discounted rate special this week only. Additionally, all new paid subscribers can drop us an email for a free Zoom consultation on searching PACER. Founding members get a one hour individualized online PACER training. All paid subscribers get access to our archives which are behind a paywall after one week. 

• If you are not in a position to make the switch, then we would ask that you use your various social and personal networks to get the word out about Court Watch. Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, or whatever, our site. If you have your own Substack, please consider recommending ours. We know that the vast majority of our subscribers come from word of mouth so we need your help.

We want to thank you for being with us these last two years. We’d very much like to get to three.  We hope you’ll consider supporting us.