Domain Expert – Legal (PACER / Federal Court Records)

To qualify you must use PACER (and federal court dockets / CM/ECF) regularly, weekly or more, as a working part of your job, with 2+ years of professional federal-litigation experience as a litigation paralegal, docket/court clerk, legal-research librarian, or litigator.

PACER knowledge we require

Reading cases & dockets

• Reading a docket sheet fluently: parties, attorneys, assigned judge, filed/terminated dates, case status

• Docket entries: interpreting terse entry text, following cross-referenced entries, and tracing procedural posture (what was filed, how the judge ruled, how the case ended)

• Decoding case numbers (division, year, case type, judge initials) and recognizing what they tell you

Searching & finding

• PACER Case Locator (nationwide index) vs. searching inside a specific court's CM/ECF, and the limits of each

• Party-name search and its traps: name variants, corporate suffixes, "et al.", d/b/a, subsidiaries, misspellings

• Filtering by court, date range, case type, and Nature of Suit; targeted retrieval instead of blind browsing

Court structure & jurisdiction

• The federal court landscape: district, appellate (circuit), and bankruptcy courts, and knowing which court a case lives in

• Case relationships: consolidated cases, MDL lead vs. member cases, transfers, and district-to-appeal linkage

Case types & classification

• Civil / criminal / bankruptcy case types; Nature of Suit codes; cause of action; party roles (plaintiff, defendant, appellant/appellee, debtor/creditor, trustee)

Documents, records & workflow

• Document types: complaint, answer, motion, brief, order, judgment, exhibit, and what each represents

• What is and is not retrievable: sealed cases, restricted/redacted documents, minute entries with no document, and the privacy rules behind them

• App workflow surfaces: saved searches, saved cases, and batch download jobs for large result sets

What you'll do

• Review and QA AI-agent rollouts: work through completed agent runs and judge whether the agent's answer is correct against the actual docket, right case, right court, right parties, right outcome/status, right document

• Identify failure modes: pinpoint where and why an agent succeeds too easily or fails wrongly, and flag tasks that are too easy or solvable without actually using PACER

• Improve realism and difficulty: refine the task prompt and the seeded world so tasks reflect authentic federal docket research and are genuinely hard for a capable agent

• Update grading guidance for accuracy: sharpen how answers are graded so correct answers pass and wrong ones fail, including gating failures (wrong case identified, misread procedural posture, missed member case, or use of a sealed/restricted document that should be off-limits)

• Catch plausible-but-wrong answers that a non-expert reviewer would let slide

Requirements

• Frequent hands-on PACER / CM/ECF use for federal docket research in your current or recent role, weekly or more

• 2+ years in federal litigation support: litigation paralegal, docket/court clerk, legal-research librarian, or litigator

• Can read a federal docket on sight: decode a case number, trace procedural posture, tell open vs. terminated, recognize case types and Nature of Suit

• Reflexive with PACER search mechanics and the name-variant traps that cause missed cases

• Sound judgment on what a correct, complete answer looks like, and the confidence to mark a plausible answer wrong

• Bonus: bankruptcy docket experience; complex/multidistrict litigation; hands-on experience across multiple courts (not just one firm's home district)

• Note: a J.D. and bar admission are welcome but not required; experienced litigation paralegals and docket specialists are the primary pool

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

Contract and Payment Terms

• You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
• This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
• Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
• Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
• Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
• Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.