I really love the stuff that Justia is doing with making access to federal resources easier and usable. One of their great sites is the Federal District Courts Opinions and Orders page, which allows you to search or browse for recent orders or opinions issued by just about any federal court in the country. You can search by Party Name, the type of lawsuit, any Federal District Court, by date, or by entering keywords into the full-text search. If documents are available, you can view them directly in the site, post them to a website, or download them as PDF files.
You can do most of this with PACER, right? Well, yes and no. All of these documents are available through PACER, but getting to them is probably not as straightforward as you would find on the Justia site. Another thing that makes the Justia page so great, in my opinion, is the ability to bookmark your case and receive updates whenever your search terms come up with new hits. When you find a case you want to keep track of, the site lets you use any of 36 bookmarking sites to bookmark the page for future reference. And when you conduct a search, you are able to save that search to an RSS feed, so that when there are new hits on your keyword, you are automatically notified.