A second new document, the disclosure instructions, is out; includes changes to gift, reimbursement reporting rules

Although not officially made public yet, minutes from the Judicial Conference’s semiannual meeting last month have been posted online and were obtained today by Fix the Court.

Several items will be of interest to the legal profession and to the public at large.

First off, the Judicial Conference voted in March (seen at right in a 2025 photo) to raise certain filing fees by 10 or 11 percent. Though the initial filing fee in U.S. district courts will remain $405, the filing fee in circuit courts will increase from $600 to $665 starting Dec. 1 — just three years after it rose from $500 to $600. Circuit courts receive about 40,000 new appeals annually, and although a significant percentage of appeals are IFP or are filed by the government, this still means that thousands of filers — as many as 15,000-20,000 each year — will have to pay the increased fee.

“Access to courts is the hallmark of our legal system, and the judiciary shouldn’t be compromising that access, even a little bit,” FTC’s Gabe Roth said.

Along a similar access vein, it’s noteworthy that in the same minutes, the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Audits and AO Accountability noted that it recently audited PACER (p. 7) a system with a penchant for overspending on tech consultants, among other financial malfeasance. To no one’s surprise, though, the results have not been made public. “The Committee was briefed on the AO’s corrective actions in response to recommendations from completed audits,” the minutes said. But the public has not been.

Additionally, the minutes note that among the branchwide priorities the JCUS Executive Committee wants to highlight over the next two years (pp. 5-6), “[a]ssur[ing] high standards of conduct and integrity for judges and employees” is one of them. But since there’s been no internal push to include the judiciary in Title VII or a new climate survey put in the field, that statement should be taken with a grain of salt.

Finally, FTC today located the new set of instructions (March 2025 for 2024 FDRs | March 2026 for 2025 FDRs | line-by-line comparison) that help judges, justices and high-level judiciary staff file periodic transaction reports and financial disclosure reports (the updated regulations are here [vs. last year’s], but the instructions are far more detailed).

Though Congress passed no new PTR or FDR laws in the last 12 months, several significant changes have been made to the document (page numbers below refer to the 2026 document itself, not the PDF page number, unless otherwise noted):

1. In contrast to members of Congress (e.g., see 2018 House memo), jurists are still not required to include crypto transactions over $1,000 on their PTRs (p. 19).

2. Maturation of debt isn’t required to be reported (pp. 19, 83), which is odd, considering the behavior of a judge whose, say, $10 million bond matures in a given year will likely differ from that of a judge whose $10 bond just matured.

3. Reimbursements from foreign governments are, in fact, reportable, which is clear from the law (5 U.S.C. 13101(15)), but the prior instructions flubbed that (p. 38 of 2025; fixed on p. 40 of 2026).

4. Receptions that bar associations and former law firms throw for judges are almost always gifts, and the new guidance confirms that (pp. 45-46). FTC identified 12 such gifts in 2023-24 but presume there may have been more during that period that went unreported.

5. Health Savings Accounts must now be reported in the “investments” section (p. 58).

6. The addition of a phrase on p. 63 — “Including stock ticker symbols is encouraged” — in the “investments” section was noteworthy in light of the Supreme Court’s new rule requiring as much from filers that are, or are part of, a publicly traded company. The lower courts don’t have the same rule, but their conflict-check software can flag ticker symbols.

7. Finally, the reason it takes so long for disclosures to be posted in the database is laid out in black and white for the first time (p. 89), though the policy has existed for as long as FTC has been around.

In short, judges get two bites at the apple to look for mistakes: once when they file and a second time before the report is about to be uploaded to the database (or, pre-2023, sent to a requester). This double-checking slows down the process monumentally and should be eliminated to ensure the FDRs are posted on time per the law.

As of last August, when they were all required to be online (minus the redactors and the extenders, about 5-10%), only 617 (26%) were posted, and last we checked, about three weeks ago, only 2,005 (85%) were.

The 2025 FDRs are due to the AO in 17 days.