Wayne County Converts to Odyssey- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected.

During the weekend of June 30th - July 1st, the Courts in Wayne County will convert to the Odyssey case tracking system, this means their Case Management System is now administered by Indiana Trial Court Technology.

This move does not affect Doxpop users because Doxpop buys access to a real-time feed of court data from the Odyssey system from the Division of State Court Administration. Your access to Wayne County court information through Doxpop 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 four week 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 Wayne 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 "County Details Page", you will find two entries for each 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 every hour, 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 August 1st. After the first, we'll be back to normal.

Tax warrants will not be affected at all by this transition.

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 TCT 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 TCT not make that information available to us. If this information is important to you, please encourage the clerks you work with to tell TCT differently 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.

E-Filing in Montgomery, Daviess and Ripley Counties.

In the last week, Montgomery and Daviess counties have both started accepting e-filings. Ripley County will begin tomorrow. In roughly two months, they will all move to mandatory e-filing (Details below.)

That means Doxpop customers can now start filing in those counties. A reminder:

If you already have a paid Doxpop account at any level, you are entitled to unlimited e-filing through our service at no additional cost. Call us at 866-369-7671 to get started.

Training is also available at no cost. If you can gather 5 or more people, we'll provide on-site training anywhere in the State. If you have fewer than 5 but are within a 90-minute drive, we are easily persuaded (call to give it a try.) Worst case: we'll set up individualized remote training. We know that an investment in excellent training & support will repay both you and us in the long run.

If you want to schedule either initial e-file training or "2018 updates to e-filing" training through your bar association, we can provide a seminar that qualifies for CLE credit.

The mandatory e-filing dates for these three new counties are as follows: Montgomery, August 21; Daviess, August 27; Ripley, August 29;

For those keeping score, only a handful of counties remain that are not e-filing. They are:

Warrick (Starts July 18)

Unscheduled as yet:

• Clinton
• Howard
• Lake
• Miami
• Pike 
• Putnam
• Sullivan
• Wayne

Update: Legal descriptions for Dearborn County restored.

We received a batch of updates that include all of the missing legal descriptions for documents filed from 5/2 through today in Dearborn County, and Dearborn is back to normal.

We believe this completely resolves the issue, but we are also planning to do a complete reload of all legal descriptions for Dearborn in the next couple of days. The reason we are taking this extra step is that there is a very slight chance that a legal description from an older document needed to be corrected during this period, and we want to make sure we pick that up. The risk of this occurring is tiny, but better safe...

Legal descriptions in Dearborn County Recorded Documents Missing Since May 2.

We just learned that due to a system update at the County, legal descriptions have not been sent for documents filed in Dearborn County since May 2nd.

The resolution of this problem should be fairly quick, but of course we want to make sure you know about the problem immediately in case it affects searches done in the last month.

We'll post an update in this blog as soon as the issue is resolved.

Welcome aboard, Lake County! Doxpop now provides access to court cases for *every* county in Indiana.

Over the last week, Doxpop loaded the historical case data for Lake County into our database. The addition of Lake County completes our quest, started in 2002, to provide public court case information for all Indiana counties.

Case information for Lake County goes back to January 1988.

E-Filing is not currently available in Lake County, but we are told that the current plan is for them to go live with e-filing in late 2018 or early 2019. When that happens, Doxpop will provide e-filing service immediately.

The imperfections:

Like most "complete" systems, there are imperfections that we'll plan to improve on in the coming months. They are:

1. Juvenile cases. Several counties store their juvenile cases on the "quest" CMS. Although most juvenile cases are confidential, JP cases filed since July 2014 are public. Because we don't have an interface to quest, we can't provide access to the JP cases in Johnson, Madison, Marion, Porter, St. Joseph and Tippecanoe counties. Note: Our E-Filing system will still work for all Juvenile cases, so the gap here is just on public access.
2. Probate Cases in St Joseph County. Currently, St. Joseph county uses the Quest CMS for their probate cases. That means that we can't provide public access for those cases, but like the juvenile cases, you can use Doxpop to initiate or e-file into existing probate cases in St Joe.
3. Some municipal courts are missing. Although most municipal courts are on Doxpop, there are a some that either use a CMS we don't interface to or have chosen not to provide access. Those are: 
   • Jamestown Town Court 
   • Thorntown Town Court
   • Whitestown Town Court 
   • Butler City Court 
   • Avon Town Court
   • New Castle City Court
   • DeMotte Town Court
   • Portland City Court
   • Crown Point City Court
   • Whiting City Court
   • East Chicago City Court
   • Hammond City Court
   • Lake Station City Court
   • Hobart City Court
   • Merrillville Town Court 
   • Schererville Town Court 
   • Elwood City Court
   • Mooresville Town Court
   • Martinsville City Court  
   • Winchester City Court
   • Batesville City Court 
   • Fremont Town Court 
   • West Lafayette City Court 
   • Sharpsville Town Court
   • Clinton City Court
   • Wabash City Court
   • Hagerstown Town Court
4. Older unconverted cases in Marion County. When Marion County converted to Odyssey, they did not do a complete conversion. In particular, many disposed civil cases were not converted. In general, this is not a serious problem, but we've found that many JP cases have had to be manually added when a support order is modified. This also creates an issue for title researchers and background check firms. Of corse, this is less of a problem with every passing year. 

See the complete list of Doxpop partner courts at this link.

Additional refinement to our Document Search Results

Shortly after releasing an update to the recorded document search results to make our quick-search links more apparent, we were contacted by users who were able to explain how they had been using this quick-search feature. It was apparent that the new buttons were making their process more difficult in a few ways:

• Links are much better at showing where you are in your process by changing color once you've visited or opened that individual link. A search button was not able to clearly indicate where you've left off or which names and descriptions you've already examined.
• Links also allowed our users to open each search in a new tab, letting you run the additional search without losing your place in your current document results. Buttons are less versatile in that they can only execute your new search in the current tab or window.

With that feedback in mind, we have updated our approach to accommodate these needs. Our apologies to anyone inconvenienced by the prior change, and a big thanks to everyone who contacted us to help identify and resolve this issue!

Specifically, we've replaced the search buttons that were added to the recorded document results with a simple search link:

The newest form of the recorded documents results page.

If you aren't aware of our other great Recorded Document features, please check out our Super Search and Full Text Search options!

Welcome Jay County to e-filing! Now is the time to get your service contact attached to your cases.

On Wednesday, June 6th Jay County joined the list of counties in the e-file system. 

This is just a reminder that if you have open cases in any of these courts now is the time to use our batch service contact attachment feature to get your preferred service contact attached to all your cases. In addition to finding your Lawrence county cases, this will catch any other open cases you may not have your private service contact attached to yet in any e-filing county.

We have a quick video showing you how it works if you click on this link.
Note: Public service contacts are now available in your service contact tools as well!


For more information about how private and public service contacts may affect you, visit our initial and follow up blog posts linked below:

• Effective 1/1/18 the State Court is doing away with the public service contacts that each attorney sets up and maintains for themselves.
• E-file Reminder: Make sure you control your service contact!
• You can now attach your firm service contact to closed, as well as open, cases in our batch attachment tool!

Recorded Document Users: Does something look different but can't quite put your finger on it?

Users on our recorded documents tab may notice a minor change in our search results.

Please note that we have replaced the magnifying glass image that is used to trigger a search on a specific name or legal description included in document search results. We found many users just didn't realize this feature existed and were missing out on a potentially handy tool! 

Old look

So we've replaced it with something that is more obvious and self-explanatory: a search button!

New Look

Nothing about the functionality or features of the search results has changed, so rest assured that this small improvement shouldn't affect your results. If you aren't aware of our other great Recorded Document features, please check out our Super Search and Full Text Search options!