Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: August 2018

Friday, August 31, 2018

A reminder that Doxpop offices will be closed Monday, September 3rd in observance of Labor Day.

We understand that sometimes you have to deal with an emergency situation during a holiday so here's how to get help over the holiday:

We will not be monitoring phone lines, so you must use email. One of our managers will be checking email periodically throughout the day. If you have a real emergency, please send an email to support@doxpop.com that contains a brief description of the problem and phone number we can call to reach you.

Please be respectful when using this option. It's for real emergencies that can't wait until Tuesday morning.

Monday, August 27, 2018

Appellate court e-filing becomes mandatory on September 1st.


On September 1, a change to the appellate rules will require that appeals be initiated via e-filing. We’ve posted several times, each focusing on one aspect of appellate filings. This post is intended to consolidate our previous advice into one resource.

The Basics:
Filing a Notice of Appeal is simple and not all that different from filing in the trial courts. The main differences are how you prepare your document, how fees are assessed and having the ability to attach any number of service contacts on your initial filing to comply with the multiple service requirements in rule 24(A)(1).

Preparing your Notice of Appeal:
When you are assembling a Notice of Appeal or Motion for Interlocutory Appeal, there are several documents that should be combined into a single PDF file to initiate the appeal. They are:

  1. The Notice of Appeal or Motion for Interlocutory Appeal.
  2. A copy of the judgment or order being appealed.
  3. If you are a public defender, your proof of appointment.
  4. If this is an interlocutory appeal, a copy of the order accepting jurisdiction.
  5. Any other required documents.

Number 5 sounds a bit open-ended, but the underlying concept here is simply that every document that you would be required to file when initiating the appeal conventionally should be combined into a single PDF file when e-filing. This will then be filed as a single lead document. This differs significantly from the process for trial courts, where each document must be a separate PDF file.

From a practical standpoint, this means that if you don't already have software for editing PDF files, it's time to purchase something so you can assemble documents from multiple sources into a single PDF file. We've been working with attorneys who are assembling PDF files for a couple of years now, and here are the PDF editors we've heard good things about:



How fees are shown when you start your filing:
Fees are assigned based on the type of document you are filing instead of the case type. So the fee next to the case type will always show $0 but when you select your filing type when adding the document you will now see the fee associated with the Notice of Appeal filing type. This document-based approach to fee calculation applies to the Court of Appeals, Supreme Court and Tax Court case types. For the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court the fee for a Notice of Appeal is currently $250. For the Tax Court, the fee for filing an Original Tax Appeal is $120.

Guidance on how to handle electronic service when filing an appeal:
When you use the Doxpop system for initiating trial court cases, we limit you to attaching one service contact during that process. However, when initiating an appellate case, you may attach any number of service contacts in order to comply with the appellate rules.

The list of the people/organizations you must serve when initiating an appeal has not changed, and can be found in the Appellate Rule 24. What has changed with e-filing is that you can now serve some of these people or organizations electronically by attaching them to the case when you file the notice of appeal.

When filing a Notice of Appeal, here are some of the people or organizations you may need to serve, and methods of attaching them when it is possible:

  • For represented parties, you will be able to find their counsel using the public service directory and attach them for e-service.
  • You will need to be sure that if required, the parties themselves are notified conventionally, as they will not have public service contacts.
  • The Judge, Clerk and Court Reporter on the original trial court case do not have public service contacts, so these three people will need to be served conventionally. (This also holds true for judges and hearing officers in connection with cases coming from administrative courts.)
  • If the case is criminal, you will always be able to serve the prosecuting attorney via e-service, using the public service contact for the attorney that most recently entered an appearance on behalf of the State. (This may not always be the current prosecuting attorney.)
  • If the case is criminal, you will also be required to serve the Attorney General. To accomplish this, you can attach the public service contact of the currently serving Attorney General. eg: Curtis Hill.
  • For expedited appeals involving children, you have a longer list found in Appellate Rule 14.1. You may find that some of those can be notified via e-service. For instance, county commissioners may have currently retained counsel that will appear on the public service contact list. Some attorneys also serve as a CASA or guardian ad litem and thus may have public service contacts. However, most of the service in this type of appeal will have to be done conventionally.

When you put together your certificate of service, for anyone whose service contact was attached at the time of filing the notice of appeal, note that they were served via "IEFS" with the date of filing.

On rare occasions, an email problem may prevent e-service from occurring, so remember to keep an eye out for any service failure notices, which will arrive via email.

Here's a look at what this section of the filing screen for a Notice of Appeal looks like:




The actual order:
On July 26, an order amending the rules for appellate procedure effective September 1, 2018 was filed.


The quick summary is that previously, the words "conventionally", and in two places "electronically" were used to specify the method of filing the documents initiating an appeal. Those modifiers have now been removed so this section no longer specifies any exception from the general rules for filing.

Rule 68(C)(1) says "Unless otherwise permitted by these rules, all documents submitted for filing in the Indiana Supreme Court or Court of Appeals by an attorney must be filed electronically using the IEFS." (Bolding added by this blogger.)

Have Questions?
Give us a call at 866-369-7671, we are happy to help!


Attorney Bar ID searching is here!


We are happy to announce the release of attorney bar ID searching in court cases allowing users to find all cases that an attorney is listed on just by using the Bar ID. 

This is now available on the court case advanced search page.

Here is what to know about this feature:

  • Only available when the party role "attorney" is selected.
  • Entering a name and bar ID will return results that either match the name or have the Bar ID listed or both. Providing you leave the "Include attorneys with no bar id." checkbox selected.
  • When using only a bar ID, uncheck the "Include attorneys with no bar id." checkbox. 
  • If the attorney you are searching has many cases you may need to narrow criteria either by search region, date period or any other option to avoid reaching our search result limit of 1,000. 

If you have any questions about this or any features on Doxpop please give us a call at 866-369-7671!

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Missing court cases for August 23rd


Court case searchers:

UPDATE: This was resolved in the afternoon of Friday, August 24th. 

During the evening hours of  Wednesday, August 22nd our operations team attempted an application upgrade that subsequently failed around 11pm. As a result of that failure, any court cases filed after that time are not displayed.

Our operations team is working to resolve this and we expect to have all new cases loaded and caught up by Friday evening.

This largely only affects new cases filed Thursday, August 23rd. Most updates made on that day to existing cases are not affected but there may be some information not updated until we have fully processed all the data.

There is a separate issue with Warrick County cases. Warrick County has been experiencing technical issues at the county Courthouse since Monday of this week and we have not been receiving updates from them all week. For this reason, we do not have any Warrick county cases for this week. We believe the technical issue on their end is resolved on their end and expect their cases to be caught up by Friday evening as well.

This does NOT affect e-filing, you still may still e-file on any case that you have the case number for via the e-filing tab.

Questions? Give us a call at 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com.


Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Special Judge Cases and E-Filing.


We are frequently asked if the electronic service provided by the e-filing system can (or should) be used to serve special judges with documents as required by Trial Rule 5(A).

The short answer is No. You must continue to serve documents for special judges conventionally.

The longer answer is that the Court has decided that judges will not be included in the public service contact list, and so there is no correct way to use the e-filing system to provide service.

We have heard reports that some law firms have tried to get around this limitation by creating a private service contact in their firm account with the judge's email address and use that contact to transmit all e-filed documents electronically. This is considered improper, so please don't do it.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Guidance for E-Service on an Initial Appellate Filing



On September 1, a change to the appellate rules will require that appeals be initiated via e-filing. Here is some guidance on how to handle electronic service when filing an appeal:

When you use the Doxpop system for initiating trial court cases, we limit you to attaching one service contact during that process. However when initiating an appellate case, you may attach any number of service contacts in order to comply with the appellate rules.

The list of the people/organizations you must serve when initiating an appeal has not changed, and can be found in the Appellate Rule 24. What has changed with E-Filing is that you can now serve some of these people or organizations electronically by attaching them to the case when you file the notice of appeal.

When filing a Notice of Appeal, here are some of the people or organizations you may need to serve, and methods of attaching them when it is possible:
  • For represented parties, you will be able to find their counsel using the public service directory and attach them for e-service.
  • You will need to be sure that if required, the parties themselves are notified conventionally, as they will not have public service contacts.
  • The Judge, Clerk and Court Reporter on the original trial court case do not have public service contacts, so these three people will need to be served conventionally. (This also holds true for judges and hearing officers in connection with cases coming from administrative courts.)
  • If the case is criminal, you will always be able to serve the prosecuting attorney via e-service, using the public service contact for the attorney that most recently entered an appearance on behalf of the State. (This may not always be the current prosecuting attorney.)
  • If the case is criminal, you will also be required to serve the Attorney General. To accomplish this, you can attach the public service contact of the currently serving Attorney General. eg: Curtis Hill.
  • For expedited appeals involving children, you have a longer list found in Appellate Rule 14.1. You may find that some of those can be notified via e-service. For instance, county commissioners may have currently retained counsel that will appear on the public service contact list. Some attorneys also serve as a CASA or guardian ad litem, and thus may have public service contacts. However, most of the service in this type of appeal will have to be done conventionally.
When you put together your certificate of service, for anyone whose service contact was attached at the time of filing the notice of appeal, note that they were served via "IEFS" with the date of filing.

On rare occasions, an email problem may prevent e-service from occurring, so remember keep an eye out for any service failure notices, which will arrive via email.

Here's a peek at what this section of the filing screen for a Notice of Appeal looks like:




In addition to learning about how service works, you may want to view our Guidance for assembling your Notice of Appeal for e-filing and information about the rule changes that require e-filing of appeals.




Monday, August 13, 2018

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

During the weekend of August 11th - August 12th, the Courts in Howard 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 Howard 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 Howard 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 September 3rd. After then, 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.

Friday, August 10, 2018

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

On Friday, August 10th Warrick 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:

Monday, August 6, 2018

Guidance for Assembling the Documents Used to Initiate an Appeal via E-Filing.


Beginning September 1, 2018 all appellate cases in Indiana must be initiated via e-filing. Here's part of the information you need to prepare for that:

When you are assembling a Notice of Appeal or Motion for Interlocutory Appeal, there are several documents that should be combined into a single PDF file to initiate the appeal. They are:
  1. The Notice of Appeal or Motion for Interlocutory Appeal.
  2. A copy of the judgment or order being appealed.
  3. If you are a public defender, your proof of appointment.
  4. If this is an interlocutory appeal, a copy of the order accepting jurisdiction.
  5. Any other required documents.
Number 5 sounds a bit open-ended, but the underlying concept here is simply that every document that you would be required to file when initiating the appeal conventionally should be combined into a single PDF file when e-filing. This will then be filed as a single lead document. This differs significantly from the process for trial courts, where each document must be a separate PDF file.

From a practical standpoint, this means that if you don't already have software for editing PDF files, it's time to purchase something so you can assemble documents from multiple sources into a single PDF file. We've been working with attorneys who are assembling PDF files for a couple of years now, and here are the PDF editors we've heard good things about:

Keep an eye out for an upcoming post regarding how to handle electronic service for your notice of appeal.










Friday, August 3, 2018

New feature added to recorded documents: See and select county specific document types.


Allowing our users to be specific about what they search for is an important part of the tools Doxpop offers, so we've now added more specific criteria to the way users can search for recorded documents.

Users may now select the local, or county document type as specified in the recorder's/register's office software as one of your search criteria. Our more general type codes remain available for those who prefer them or are searching across counties.

Also, as part of introducing this new feature, you will notice we have updated and streamlined the layout of the advanced search page.

The details: 

What is a 'County Document Type'?

Each county that we partner with has their own set of document type codes that are defined locally in their office's indexing system. These document type codes are often abbreviated so much that most of us can't guess what they mean. Because of this, we haven't allowed searches on them because some codes only make sense to people who know that county well. But lately, we have been hearing from our users that they have an interest in being able to search on these codes. So as we always do, we listened and challenged our team to add this feature in a way that makes sense.

Okay, so where did the general type codes already used on Doxpop come from?

Doxpop has always taken on the task to review these county document types in each county along with the recorder's/register's office to associate each of them with a simple and more general document type category such as deed, mortgage and so forth. So when you searched for a "Deed" for example we actually return any document with a 'county document type' that has been determined to be related to a deed. This grouping will still be available using the 'Document Type Group' and we have not changed the way this works, we've just added some more transparency when searching in a specific county.

The important part: How does it work?

On the advanced search page for document types, you will now find two document type options:
  1. Document Type Group
  2. County Document Type

When you have All Doxpop Counties selected or a custom search region with multiple counties, you will only be able to select 'Document Type Group'.

But!... If you do select a single county the system will then allow you to search using the 'County Document Type' 
  • If you select the 'Document Type Group' first you will see that we automatically select all the County Document Types that are associated with that category. (as shown in the screenshot above)
  • If you do choose to select one or more specific county document types, you may do so in that drop down using the checkboxes.
  • Plus, if you have selected a 'Document Type Group' and then want to refine what local types from that you may do so. Note that if you change the 'County Document Type' selections after selecting the group, the group will show "all" just indicating that the search will use the County Document Type that you have custom selected. 


If you have any question or just would like general help with your searching techniques we invite you to contact support at support@doxpop.com or call at 1-866-369-7671.

Enhancements made to court case searching and party roles.


In the past, if you ran a name search using the search widget found on the upper right corner of most pages, the welcome tab, or the court cases tab the results returned all cases matching that name, regardless of the role of the person with that name in the case.

That made it hard to sort through the results if the name of a party you are searching for is also the name of an attorney or another officer of the court that may be involved in hundreds or even thousands of cases. In brief, there was too much clutter.

To address that problem, we looked at the types of searches that are most commonly done:
  1. The most common use of the name search is to look for people who are a party to a case, for instance, a Defendant, Plaintiff, Respondent, etc...
  2. The second most common use is to search for all cases for an attorney.
Searches for people in other roles are done occasionally, but make up a tiny part of the searching.

Using that information, we streamlined the simple searching widget that appears at the top right of most pages, the welcome tab, and the court cases tab to search for either a party or an attorney (but not both at the same time). That means you'll start getting less cluttered results for the most common types of name searches.

In the search widgets, you will have the option to search using the role of "Case Party" or "Attorney":
Header Widget

Court Tab

Welcome Tab
When you choose "Case Party" your results will include any person involved in the case with one of these roles:
  • Defendant/Respondent
  • Plaintiff/Petitioner
  • Alias Name
  • Executor
  • Subject
Choosing "Attorney" only returns results where the named person is an attorney of record on the case.

Should you wish to do a search for other case roles, use the advanced search. There, you can select less common roles, or do a broad search for all case roles using the "Party Role" drop-down menu:


In addition to these changes, we've removed the way we group results when you search for particular party types. Through trying to improve that grouping process we realized there is just not a way given the data we have to reasonably group cases together by a particular party without possibly associating two people with the same name that are not the same person.

If you have any question or just would like general help with your searching techniques we invite you to contact support at support@doxpop.com or call at 1-866-369-7671.



Thursday, August 2, 2018

Of interest to Richmond-area attorneys: Whitewater Valley Pro Bono "Race for Justice" is next Saturday

Doxpop is located in Richmond, and we appreciate the efforts of our local Whitewater Valley Pro Bono Commission to provide justice for those in our community who can't afford to hire an attorney.

This Saturday, (August 4th, 2018) the Pro Bono Commission's sixth annual Race for Justice fundraiser will be held at Glen Miller park in Richmond.

You can find details here: http://www.whitewatervalleyprobono.org/raceforjustice.html.

Thanks also to the folks who sponsor this event:

John Maley, Esq.
Barnes and Thornburg
Burton and Simkin




Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Appeals must be initiated via e-filing beginning September 1st


On July 26, an order amending the rules for appellate procedure effective September 1, 2018 was filed.

You can view the order here: https://www.in.gov/judiciary/files/order-rules-2018-0726-appellate.pdf.

The quick summary is that previously, the words "conventionally", and in two places "electronically" were used to specify the method of filing the documents initiating an appeal. Those modifiers have now been removed so this section no longer specifies any exception from the general rules for filing.

Rule 68(C)(1) says "Unless otherwise permitted by these rules, all documents submitted for filing in the Indiana Supreme Court or Court of Appeals by an attorney must be filed electronically using the IEFS." (Bolding added by this blogger.)

Doxpop is prepared for this, and you will find the details of how to initiate an appeal via e-filing in a previous post found here: