Issue with "Date of Last Known Filing" Updates

[ronerofe]

Recently I have noticed on the CourtListener website that the "Date of Last Known Filing" for District Courts no longer is automatically updated. It used to be the case (I think no more than a year ago) that for District Courts (regardless of whether they provide RSS feed updates) that the "Date of Last Known Filing" would update regularly based on what is shown on the main case page on PACER, without having to open the docket itself (and get charged by PACER). Not sure when this started happening, but that is no longer the case.

For example, this case currently shows a "Last Known Filing Date" of 2/4/2025.

But if you go on PACER to the case page, the "Last Known Filing Date" is 2/18/2025.

Hopefully this is just a bug and not a deliberate change as I found this feature to be very helpful.

[mlissner]

Hi @ronerofe. This is indeed a value that we scrape, but we only do so for some cases and we have to do so heuristically. Some of the tools we use to decide whether to scrape this value is whether there's an alert for a case or whether it's bookmarked, the number of views it has, etc.

[ronerofe]

OK, am assuming by bookmarked you mean the Note feature. Should it be the case then that if it has a Note on it, it will be scraped? I think none of the cases where I have a note currently has that value scraped and only gets updated by viewing the actual docket filings. But I remember this not being the case last year.

[mlissner]

We've had to pull this feature back a bit because there is only so much we can scrape before the courts start cutting us off. It's definitely something we'd like to do more, but we'd have to look at the code to know what kinds of guarantees there are. Sorry. It's just a tough one.