A late-developing bill that would require state courts to provide free, online access to civil case documents in most cases has sparked a new judiciary-related battlefront in the final weeks of the legislative session.

Introduced by the Assembly Judiciary Committee, AB 2962 would place new restrictions on courts that over the years have created their own online case-access systems and charged fees for simple name searches and document retrievals. The result has been a patchwork of approaches that often favors those who can afford to pay.