Visualizing Six Million Files and Folders

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.