Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: September 2019

Monday, September 30, 2019

An addition to Trial Rule 86 paves the way for e-filing protection orders and workplace violence restraining orders.


Many of you have inquired about why Protection Orders cannot be e-filed.

The answer is complex and has to do with a federal regulation that prohibits posting some parts of protective order cases on the Internet. That rule creates some conflict with the Indiana rule that Protection Orders are public. In addition, Protection Orders are often filed pro se by the protected person on their own, or with the assistance of an advocate who is not an attorney, so there is a good reason to set up a guided filing process for cases of these types.

The State Court has now come up with a solution in the form of an e-filing portal that is only used for protection orders and workplace violence restraining orders. The new e-filing portal for protection orders will be available statewide on October 1, 2019. This portal is located at https://public.courts.in.gov/porefsp

In preparation for e-filing, the court has also recently added Trial Rule 86(Q) which covers filing and service for these cases. This rule becomes effective on October 1, 2019:

(Q) Protection Order Cases, Workplace Violence Restraining Order Cases, and Child Protection Orders: Issuance of Summons and Service of Petition and Ex Parte Order or Equivalent Proceeding.
(1) The Protection Order Registry E-Filing Service Provider (POR EFSP) is the only provider for e-filing of all initial complaints or equivalent subsequent pleadings and all subsequent filings for civil protection orders and workplace violence restraining orders (PO case types) and for requests for child protection orders (JQ case types).
(2) Where service of process is required by Trial Rule 4.1 through 4.16, for any document filed in or issued by the Court in a civil protection order or workplace violence restraining order case (PO case types) and in a child protection order case (JQ case type), that service must be accomplished by the Clerk, a Sheriff, court official, or other person appointed by a Court to complete service of process.

Sunday, September 29, 2019

A new look and new features for Recorder and Register of Deeds services!


Doxpop is proud to announce a new look and added features for our Recorded Document and Register of Deeds services. We are posting this “Sneak Preview” on Monday, 9/30 to prepare you, and we will release the changes on Wednesday, 10/2. (Update: The changes have now been released.)

If you already use our tax warrant service, you will find these updates very familiar. There is no change to the data that is available or how your searches function, we’ve just made the system a little easier to use.

We have made changes in three areas:

  • The search criteria on the advanced search page have been rearranged for ease of use.
  • New tools have been added to the result list and document detail screens. 
  • You can now browse through the detail pages of your search results without returning to the search results page between each detail view.

First, let’s take a look at the streamlined advanced search page:

  • The layout is changed to make it easier to locate fields.
  • Since land can be platted or unplatted,  but never both, when you start entering information in Lot/Block/Subdivision the non-platted land fields become inactive and the reverse occurs if you enter information in the Township/Section/Range.
  • Michigan users will notice that we changed the order on a few of the less common fields towards the bottom.

Indiana Searchers (click to enlarge):
Indiana Advanced Search
Michigan Searchers (click to enlarge):
Michigan Advanced Search

Search results have several improvements:

  • A [reset sorting] button has been added that resets the column sorting to default.
  • A  “Filter” box has been added to quickly locate items in large result sets. To use the filter, just start typing in the filter box and the result set will narrow to only entries containing the text you entered.
  • Finally, there’s a simpler way to save or set email alerts on documents! Click on the star to save a document. Click on the bell to set an alert on the document. A second click turns each of these off.

Search Results

Here’s what we changed in the document detail area:

  • At the top left of the details page, there is a back arrow that will return you to your search results. In the center are navigation buttons that will walk you through the details of each document in your result set without requiring you to return to the search results.
  • The top right has the star to save a document and bell to set an alert.
  • The image preview link is now more prominently displayed right under the document heading to the left.

Document Details

Our goal with these features is to make your work more pleasant and productive. Please explore these features when they are released on Wednesday and let us know how we did! If you have any questions about the changes or need help, please contact our support team at 866-369-7671 or support@doxpop.com.

Sunday, September 1, 2019

About that lengthy outage on Saturday, August 31.


On Saturday (8/31/19) Doxpop had an extended outage of all of our services from roughly 9:00AM to 10:30 PM.

The root cause was an outage in Amazon's cloud computing service that affected many of their customers. However, after Amazon restored their service, we found that our database files had been corrupted, which meant a busy day for our operations team as they worked to restore our services.

For the most part, everything is back to normal now. All of the public records information for Court, Land Records and Tax Warrants are in good shape. E-filing is also functioning fine. The only loss of data was for some of our customer transactions that occurred between 5AM and 9AM on Saturday morning. We'll be following up with a few customers on Tuesday about that, but the damage was minor. Let us know if you see anything we ought to check out on your account that happened during the window from 5AM-9AM Saturday.

Since the courts were closed and it was a holiday weekend, we don't anticipate any issues with e-filers missing deadlines. However, if we're wrong, and if you missed a filing deadline on Saturday, remember that Trial Rule 86(N) provides a remedy for inability to e-file, and don't hesitate to contact us if you need an affidavit to back up your claim under that rule.

Our apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by this outage! We know you have come to depend on us for reliable service and we work hard to never let you down, but every once in a while we have a really bad day, and Saturday was one of those days.