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.