Each year there are nearly 300,000 of these in Federal Federal Civil Court, 1.3-1.6 million in Federal Bankruptcy Court, but this pales in comparison to state courts, which accept just over 100 million cases each year.
Even a small extract of these takes up a fair amount of space:
This is what a court docket looks like –
This includes an actual document (PDF or html), xml metadata, although this varies case by case.
Divided up into groups of a half dozen, these feel manageable:
Each of these is in one of 256 folders contains group of a half-dozen like the above listing:
Each of these 256 folders is contained within another group of 256 folders:
And that’s just for ~500k cases. Imagine how much paper is sitting out there in the world.