Doxpop's transition to the new Tax Warrant service is complete.

If you are not already using the "tax warrant" tab for all of your tax warrant research, it is time to make the switch. At 5:30 AM on Friday, 3/31/17, we will be turning off access to tax warrants through the "court cases" tab. From about 5:30 AM to 5:45 AM the site will be down while we install an update that includes this change.

On February 9th, Doxpop introduced a new tab that our subscribers can use to search for Tax Warrants across the entire state with a single search. Prior to our investment in this new service, we were only able to provide tax warrants in 23 out of the 92 counties, so this service increases our geographical coverage to roughly 4 times that of the previous service.

During the introduction of this service, we continued to provide access to the tax warrants that were available through our old court records service while we gathered feedback on the new tax warrant tab. The main feedback we got was that although most of those who tried the new "Super Search" method of searching for tax warrants loved it, those who had built their search procedures around our traditional searching tools hated it.

In response to this feedback, on February 28th we added the ability to search the statewide tax warrant database using either the Super Search or our traditional search tools. We have now had this service running in parallel with the old service for a month with both search options enabled, and our users are reporting consistent and accurate results.

That means it is time to turn off the old service and ask you all to begin using the new "tax warrants" for your searching these records. From this point forward, tax warrants will not be commingled with court records, and you will only be able to find them through the "tax warrant" tab.

The folks who are accessing tax warrants through the court api service will continue to have access to the tax warrants from the original smaller group of counties through the api because we don't yet provide an api for tax warrants.

Change in Monroe County Sheriff Service fees

The Monroe County Clerk's Office would prefer that sheriff fees for service be paid directly to the sheriff. They are still accepting these fees in their office when necessary, but would like to no longer need to accept them over the coming weeks.

Please begin to submit your service fees to the sheriff, even though the option to pay this through E-Filing may remain for a short while.

Thank you!

Boone County added to Doxpop Courts, Tippecanoe Live on E-Filing, with a twist...

Doxpop has just added the Boone County Trial Courts to our database of current court records. Court case Information is available for Boone County Circuit Court, Superior Courts 1 & 2 from January 1994 forward and Zionsville Town Court for September 2013 forward. All Doxpop services are now available for these courts. This includes services like having your hearing calendar delivered directly to your mobile device or office calendaring system and setting alerts on cases.

Also in recent news, Hancock, Tippecanoe and Wabash County Courts have all commenced e-filing. We welcome them to the group of courts that Doxpop provides E-Filing services for!

Tippecanoe has an interesting twist that you should be aware of. They are the first county to implement the E-Filing system using the "Quest" CMS, which many counties use to manage their juvenile cases. 

That means three things for those using Doxpop to e-file in Tippecanoe:

1. When filing a new juvenile case, in the "Location" selection, choose "Tippecanoe County (Quest)" from the drop-down menu. 
2. When a new case that is anything other than juvenile, choose "Tippecanoe County (Odyssey)" from the drop-down menu.
3. When looking up a confidential juvenile case to submit a subsequent filing, use the "Find E-Filable Cases" menu item under the "my doxpop" tab.

Let us know if you have any questions about how the separate Tippecanoe location entries function. If you are in one of the counties that recently started e-filing, give us a call lo learn how to begin e-filing through Doxpop and obtain training at no cost! 

Call 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com.

Vanderburgh Sheriff fees to be paid through clerk's office until end of April.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a note that the intended switch to paying Sheriff's Service fees directly to the Sheriff in Vanderburgh had been delayed. Today we learned that they will be accepting these fees only through the clerk's office at least through the end of April.

Why April? The clerk has wisely opted to make no changes until the close of the legislative session, because there is some hope that the legislature will clarify the rules for collecting this fee.

This information and a few other useful e-filing tips for folks from Vanderburgh can be found at the Evansville Bar Association website.

Muncie City Court Moves to Odyssey. Court record access through Doxpop continues without interruption.

Over the weekend of March 4th/5th, the Muncie City Court converted to the Odyssey case tracking system, thus moving their data storage and administration to Indianapolis. 

This move does not significantly affect Doxpop users because Doxpop buys access from the State Court Administration to a real-time feed of court data from the Odyssey system. Our customers' access to Muncie Court information will not be interrupted during this transition.

A few of the services we provide will look odd during the transition because there will be a short period when both the old data and the new data are available. In particular:

• If you use the personal calendar feature to keep track of hearings connected to your Bar ID, you will see two colors for each County on your calendar. Every event will be available, but the older cases will have a different color from the newer cases. When we complete the merge process, these will go back to being a single color.
• When you look at our "Delaware County Details Page", you will find two entries for the Muncie Court court until the merge is complete.
• When you are doing searches, you will find two entries for some cases. This is because while we are loading the information from Odyssey, we will also be maintaining the old data until the operation is complete to ensure you don't miss anything. When you see two case entries, please look at both to ensure you have the most current information.
• If you use any of our "watch" services to keep an eye on cases or people of interest, we will be moving those watches over so they point to the cases and people that are a part of the Odyssey data feed. We run a process to convert these twice each day, but it is possible for notification of events to slip through the cracks between conversion runs so you may want to periodically do a manual check between now and the first week of April, after that, we'll be back to normal.

For some time, Doxpop has been maintaining a separate record of Yorktown court cases because there was an incomplete conversion on the court side when the Yorktown cases were moved to Muncie. If this latest conversion addressed that issue, we will remove the Yorktown records soon in order to avoid duplication. (That will be announced in this blog when it occurs.)

Finally, one deficiency in the Odyssey system is that financial information is not exported in their data feed, so that detail will not be available after the transition. We regularly ask that the Court Administration add this to the data feed, but so far, we are told that it is not allowed because the clerks using the Odyssey system have requested that they not make that information available to us. If this information is important to you, please encourage the clerks you work with to tell the State Court Administration of your needs so we can get the information back online.

As always, we are available to answer any questions in person, so don't hesitate to call support at 866-369-7671 if you have any questions.

A couple of notes on Sheriff Service Fees: Vanderburgh and Criminal

We recently checked in with the Vanderburgh County Clerk's office and learned that although they had planned to have payments for civil process of service go directly to the Sheriff starting on March 1, that has been delayed.

Apologies to folks who saw our earlier post about this or attended training where I told you the cut-over date was March 1! I just updated the list in our earlier blog post about this to say "Any day now" because that's the best we can do at the moment. Until this change occurs, you must still pay the clerk, but by using a separate check, not by paying via the e-filing system.

Also, Attorney Richard Mann  alerted us on Friday that he was seeing the option to add Sheriff's service on some subsequent filings in criminal cases. Obviously, that's an error. We can't think of any situations where such service would be used in a criminal case.

Unfortunately, that particular error comes to us through a configuration file controlled by the court, so we've alerted the proper folks on the court end,  but until they investigate the problem and fix it up, all we can do is give you the heads-up and tell you not to choose that option. Consider yourself alerted. <grin>