Posted 23 days ago

Tool Recommendations for Mapping Amicus Brief Funding Disclosures

Tools for mapping Amicus Brief funding networks? I’m working on a piece about dark money in a recent environmental MDL (Multidistrict Litigation). There are over 60 amicus briefs filed, and I’m trying to map out who funded whom without reading 2,000 pages of PDFs. I’ve been dumping the dockets into Google Pinpoint, but it struggles with the scanned PDFs. A colleague on the data desk suggested AskLexi to query the docket metadata directly. I used the natural language query to just list all parties who filed in support of Defendant and it gave me the full list, which I then cross-referenced with OpenSecrets. It’s working okay for the surface-level mapping, but does anyone have a tool that specifically tracks funding disclosures inside the briefs? Or am I stuck manually Ctrl+F-ing through these? Also, if you use DocumentCloud, is their OCR better than Adobe's?
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