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 Clay 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 about 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 Clay 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 26th. 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.
2 comments:
I will be glad when all court convert to Odyssey. At least citizens, state employees and others can get the public records they need without these user accounts and search limits. I am lucky to work in a county that uses Odyssey, as do many of the surrounding counties. But when I have to deal with someone from a neighboring county that only uses doxpop, I either forego the search or have to go through the hassle of a doxpop search to find the information I need--and if that person doesn't have an entry, then that just cost you a search. Never mind those that have records in doxpop only counties and you just don't think to search or don't want to blow your search quota going down rabbit holes. And hope you don't misspell the name or make a typo--there goes another search. I don't know where anyone ever thought it right for doxpop to be sanctioned to hold public records hostage and charge the public and civil servants to access them.
Hi Anonymous-
Nick here, a not anonymous person who works at Doxpop and has the courage to attach his name to his words.
I'm sorry to hear that you think we hold records hostage. That's a bizarre claim since we have actually made the records more available without using public funding. When we started in 2002, only one county had their records online, and they paid over $10,000/year of their local taxpayer's money to do that. Most counties couldn't afford to do that, so we set out to solve the problem without charging the taxpayers. Doxpop's proposition to every county was: If you'll let us access the public information, we'll put it online at no cost to the county, and charge professional users for access it in order to fund our work.
Our service has never reduced your ability to use any previously existing public access system. It has always a been provided *in addition* to whatever the county already had. And since we don't charge to do our work, we left the counties and State with more money in their coffers to provide access of their own if they decided to do so.
In many counties, you can now access court information through myCase, a part of the Odyssey system for "free". That seems wonderful, but the downside is that literally millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money has gone into supporting this "free" service.
That's great for you if you are a professional that uses the information to make money in your business, but not such a great deal for the average taxpayer who doesn't need the information every day, but now subsidizes your business.
Saying we hold the information hostage is like saying a title abstractor holds land records hostage. In both cases, the information you pay to obtain is all part of the public record and you could get it for yourself by going to the courthouse. What we charge for is the service of collecting that information and making it available to you without having to leave your desk.
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