The State Court's INFile Project is Significantly Delayed

Earlier in July, the State Court sent out a notice that their "INFile" project will be significantly delayed. Their specific wording was "We anticipated those changes would take effect this spring, but they will not be available soon."

We interpret this to mean a delay of at least 6 months, probably longer. What this means for E-Filing firm administrators is that you can simply take the INFile transition off of your 2026 "ToDo" list, and relax. 

When we see it appear on the horizon again, you can count on us to make sure you have plenty of advance warning. Of course, if you have any questions about our advanced E-Filing options and features, please reach out to our friendly support team for assistance.

Make Sure You Are Getting All the Important Emails Related to E-Filing and Court Cases.

Tame your E-mail notices and ensure that everyone in your office is getting the notifications they need!

 First, Your Spam Filter:

The first step will be to ensure that your spam filter knows which domains to allow. We have an up to date list of domains below that should be on your "Safe Sender" list:

• doxpop.com
• efilingmail.tylertech.cloud
• tylerhost.cloud
• tylerhost.net
• tylertech.com
• courts.in.gov
• mail.incourts.gov
• subscription.in.gov

If you don't have an IT department to do this for you, here are a couple of short videos describing how to do this on the most common email systems:

• Outlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk4qgQhvVv4
• Google Mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYBTN9z1PW8
• If you use a different email system, give us a call and we'll help you find instructions!

When Your Spam Filter Isn't The Problem, But You're Still Not Receiving Notices:

Another common issue is that either the sending system has the wrong address or has stopped sending entirely. This can get confusing because notices use email addresses stored in three different locations. Knowing which system you're having problems with is the first step, and the solution for each is slightly different:

Notice of Electronic Filing and Notification of Acceptance or Rejection come from the user section of the E-Filing Manager (EFM.) If you stop receiving these notifications, there may be two reasons:

1. The email address is wrong. To correct this, have your E-Filing administrator go to the "Users" section of E-Filing Administration and check your address there.

2. You are on the "suppression list", meaning your email server previously rejected a message, and so the EFM has given up on trying to even send emails. To solve this problem, call Doxpop if we are your E-Filing service provider. We can solve the problem quickly. If Doxpop isn't your service provider, you should call whoever provides your service.

Notice of Electronic Service comes from the e-service section of the E-Filing Manager (EFM.) If you stop receiving these notifications, there may be two reasons:

1. The email address is wrong. To correct this:

1. For Public Service Contacts, check the attorney's address in the Roll of Attorneys. (https://secure.in.gov/Apps/courts/portal/)

2. For Private Service Contacts, have your E-Filing administrator go to the "Service Contacts" section of E-Filing Administration and check the address(es) on the Service Contact that isn't working.

2. You are on the "suppression list", meaning your email server previously rejected a message, and so the EFM has given up on trying to even send emails. (See the section above for how to resolve this.)

Notices of Orders or Judgments come from the Odyssey system. If you stop receiving these notifications, call your local clerk's office, and ask them to check the email address for the attorney in their "Attorney Master" record. If it needs to be corrected, they can take care of that, and changing it in your county will resolve the issue for all counties.

What if Other People Aren't Receiving Your Notices?

Sometimes you'll receive an email Notice that says "E-Service Undeliverable". This always means that the opposing counsel has a problem with their email. However, the burden is on you to make sure service occurs anyway. Here's how to handle this:

1. Contact the person the E-Service couldn't be delivered to, so they know they need to diagnose their email problem. (Send them a copy of this article!)

2. While you've got them on the phone, work out another way to deliver the filing to them. Often you can just email the documents directly. 

If you use Doxpop, you can also just give our support staff a call and they'll help you resolve any of these problems.

Even better, you can just use our in-app notification archive to avoid having to depend on email for any notice related to E-Filing. We don't think email is reliable, so we've created an alternative (and backup) system for our users that allows you to see and review notifications through our web site instead of depending on email. (Click here to learn more: https://blog.doxpop.com/2026/04/have-you-ever-missed-important-E-Filing.html)

Have You Ever Missed an Important E-Filing Email? We've Got a Simple Solution.

Important: A few folks have been alarmed because they see a large number of "unread notifications" when viewing the dashboard for the first time. That is because we have tracked all of your past notifications in this area as a backup for the emailed notifications. You can safely mark them all as "read" or "archived" using the tools at the top of the list.

Email notifications for filing status or service not getting through are the most common problem our support team sees, so we strongly suggest that all of our E-Filers check out the E-Filing dashboard. What the dashboard does is provide a complete and reliable list of every event that you should have received an email for, so on those days when email is slow or unreliable, it won't slow you down.

We've recently added a new section for "Unread Filing Notice Notifications" that quickly links to all new notifications you receive from the E-Filing Manager.

If you're not yet making use of the E-Filing Dashboard, you can find this by clicking on the "e-filing" tab, located here:

This page will show your personal dashboard on the left side of the screen, along with a number of helpful links and access to begin searching or filing through Doxpop.

The new link is at the top of the Dashboard section and will display the number of unread "Notice of Electronic Filing" notifications so that you can keep track of these more easily. Clicking on the link in the dashboard will take you to the Filing Notices section of your E-Filing notifications in the notifications tab.

In addition to updating this dashboard display, Doxpop has also updated our handling of unread/archived messages. After hearing from some users that archiving unread notifications makes their inboxes difficult to track, we will now consider archived messages as read when displaying your unread notifications. This change is designed to help the dashboard remain a quick and reliable way to track the E-Filing notifications that matter to you.

This change to our calculation of your unread notifications could also result in a major, sudden drop in the numbers listed in your personal dashboard. If you notice a change to your unread notifications it is likely to be related to this update, but we always welcome a call if you have any concerns. Our support team can be reached at support@doxpop.com or by calling 866-369-7671 if you have any questions or would like to learn more.

Updates on timing of the Indiana E-Filing Transition. (Merry Christmas?!)

We'll preface this by saying that these are still tentative, but it's the best we can provide, as we're dependent on the folks at the State for this information. (Not casting blame... We believe the folks at the State are doing their best, and working hard to meet deadlines. We appreciate the efforts of the OCT development team, even as we groan about shifting timeframes. They are great to work with.)

So:

The optimistic schedule is that the transition will occur on Friday, December 19th with a brief filing hiatus in the morning to allow the clerks to clear out their pending envelopes, and go-live on the new system in the afternoon.

The worst-case (but becoming likely) schedule is that the transition will occur on Friday, December 26th with a brief filing hiatus in the morning to allow the clerks to clear out their pending envelopes, and go-live on the new system in the afternoon.

If your law firm won't be open on the 26th, that's not a problem. We'll be there for you on Monday, December 29th, through Wednesday, December 30th to help with the transition whenever you reopen after the Christmas holiday.

If your law firm will be open on December 26th, but you will be out, please get in touch with us so we can help out. If you've done all of the preparation in advance, we can work with someone else in the the firm to walk them through the process of firm setup.

We're all adjusting our own schedules here at Doxpop, and will let you know as soon as we have a real commitment on timing from the State.

Step one in preparing for the transition to Indiana's New EFM: Financial History

This is the first in a series of posts for Admins preparing for Indiana's transition to an EFM. All of these posts are long, but don't worry! They are long because we're going into extensive detail to make sure the instructions are easy to follow. The actual work is easy (This one will take most people about 10 minutes do the work, and a short wait for the report to be delivered via email.)

The second step can be found here:

https://blog.doxpop.com/2025/12/step-two-in-preparing-for-transition-to.html

We suggest doing downloading the last year's worth of financial information as soon as possible. Then, just before the transition occurs, download the rest. When you receive these files, you don't need to send them to us. These records are for you to have saved just in case you need them later.  And of course, if you run into any problems, we're here to help. Call us at 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com.

The financial information takes a long time to retrieve and loads the server heavily, so we'll retrieve your information for the past year now, and then the day before the transition, run a final, small, report to retrieve the last couple of weeks. 

Some of you don't have to do this:

• If you already routinely retrieve and process your financial information every month, there's no need to duplicate that effort- We just want to make sure the people who don't regularly retrieve and keep these reports are retrieving at least a year's worth of transactions in case they are needed to identify an expense later.

• If you are with a government office that never does an initial filing, or an office that always uses a fee waiver, there's no need to do this. The financial information is only important to firms that pay initial court filing or civil process fees via credit card.

To retrieve the financial information, login and click on the "e-filing" tab. Then click on "Create a Financial Report":

In the "Date of Filing" line, choose "In the last 12 months" from the drop-down menu. Leave the "Location" and "Submitter" lines at the default values of "All". Then click on the green [Create Report] button.

You will receive a confirmation message that says "Your report is being created and will be emailed to you within the next hour."

When the report arrives, it will be attached to an email with the subject line "E-Filing financial report". The filename of the attachment will be "FinancialReport.csv". 

Files with the ".csv" filename extension can be loaded into spreadsheets like MS Excel or Google Sheets. Open this file in one of those programs to make sure all of your data was captured. (Usually, just double-clicking on the file will accomplish this.) After you've confirmed that all is well, make a backup of the file, and you're done with this step.

Note: Some larger firms may need to break this process up & retrieve smaller chunks of information to avoid having the server timeout. If you get an error message in your email indicating failure for this reason, please give us a call (866-369-7671) and we'll help!

Your basic preparation for financial information is now complete. The next step will be the day before the transition, when you'll run a second financial report to pick up the last couple of weeks.

Important update for E-Filers on the State Court's transition to a new EFM

We have recently started identifying the people we'll be working with to configure their E-Filing account when the State Court releases their new E-Filing Manager (EFM.) If you E-filed in the last year, we sent you an email asking who we should work with in your law firm. As with all projects, clear communication is crucial, so please respond to that email if you haven't already done so!

We expect the new EFM to be released on either the weekend of  12/6-12/7 or the weekend of 12/13-12/14. For you, that means on Monday of either the 8th or 15th of December, you or your firm administrator will have some work to do before anyone can E-File. 

When the old EFM goes offline, the user and firm information you currently access through the "E-filing Account Administration" page will be gone. We'll need to quickly re-establish that account so you and/or your firm's filers can keep working. We'll provide your designated administrator with instructions for how to capture that information before the transition, and then detailed instructions on how to set up your accounts on day one. (Both step-by-step text and video demonstrations.)

It's important to know that the parts of Doxpop's E-Filing system that you interact with most often won't have any significant changes. The filing submission pages and the "My Electronic Filings" pages will look and act like they always have, so there's no need to worry about re-training for your daily tasks.

There is a second task we'll work with you on in the two weeks preceding the transition:

When the old EFM is replaced, we'll lose access to the information on old filings that you typically look up in the "My Electronic Filings" page. Generally, that won't be a big deal because once a filing has been accepted, it is rarely necessary to go back and look at it. The two exceptions are to glean the fee information you need for your accounting processes and to resolve any issues related to E-Service (service per Trial Rule 5). We'll provide you with instructions on how to preserve this information.

Fortunately, both of the tasks outlined will only need to be done once, so we'll make sure you have good instructions and that we're available to help if anything is confusing. We plan to have one busy morning working together, and then get on with normal work.

Many folks have asked why we don't know the exact date yet. The answer is that the State Court has not yet committed to a date. The moment they do, we'll post it on this blog. 

***There's a subscription link over on the right side of this page. If you subscribe, that will ensure that you get an email whenever we post new information.***

Frustrated by the Service contact #|CODE|# message? Help is on the horizon!

In last week's blog post, we told you that the Indiana Courts are making some major changes to the system we submit your envelopes to when you E-File. Big changes are scary, but are also opportunities for improvement, so in the next few posts, we'll share some of the ways this change will make your work easier.

Currently, filers occasionally get a frustrating error message that prevents filing. If you've ever seen this message, you know the pain:

Service contact #|CODE|# is not eligible for electronic service.

The good news is that in December, this problem will go away! ...The bad news, of course, is that it won't happen until December.

Fortunately, we've got a workaround to deal with this problem until December. First, we'll explain the workaround so you know how to deal with it. Second, we'll explain why it's likely to be with us until December, and why we think the future is brighter.

The Workaround:

This problem is caused because one of the e-service contacts attached to the case you are filing on has a flag set that makes the EFM think it can only be used for postal service, not e-service. Here is the workaround:

1. Determine which Service Contact is the issue. You can do that by deleting the current draft that shows the error. You'll find the [Delete this Draft] button in the green "E-File & Serve on this Case" field.
2. Go back to the case e-filing screen, and prior to uploading any documents, scroll down to the "Contacts to E-Serve" section and click the green slider button to unselect all.
3. Select one contact and upload a document to see if the error appears. If not, add each Service Contact, oneat a time, until you see the error. Then you'll be able to delete that draft again to clear the error. 
4. Go back to the initial filing screen, and start by clicking the green slider button next to the contact that caused the error in the "Contacts to E-Serve". This will "turn off" that contact. 
5. Now, proceed with the filing normally.

Using this workaround, you'll be able to do everything except serve the errored contact, so you'll want to note the email address for them and send them service directly. It's a painfully long workaround, but for the moment, it's the best option.

Why This Error Won't Go Away Until December:

This error currently exists due to Indiana Courts using the “ECF4” system, while the vendor they are working with focuses on their “ECF5” system. Due to this focus, the error was fixed on ECF5, but we believe it is unlikely we'll see the same fix for the ECF4 system. But there is good news! Since the Indiana Courts are rolling out their own in-house E-Filing Manager in December, we know this problem will be resolved then. We also believe that in the future, the folks in Indianapolis will be more responsive to problems like this than their current vendor has been in the past.

Thank you for choosing us as your E-Filing Service Provider. We plan to continue providing a positive experience to everyone using our site. If you ever need support or have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us! Our great support team can be reached via any of the options listed on this page: https://www.doxpop.com/prod/in/help/HelpTopic

Major changes behind-the-scenes in E-Filing.

In late November or early December, The Indiana Office of Court Technology (IOCT) will be releasing a new version of the E-Filing Manager (EFM) used by E-Filing Service Providers (EFSPs). 

That's way too many acronyms packed into one sentence! However, this is important for you, so let's take a moment to unpack them:

An EFSP is the part of the E-Filing system that filers use to submit pleadings to the court. Doxpop is one example of an EFSP, and others can be found on this page: https://www.in.gov/courts/efiling/providers/. 

In brief, the role of an EFSP is to guide you through the process of assembling the documents you want to file with a court into an Envelope for submission. In addition to uploading documents, the EFSP also gathers the necessary information to create a case for an initial filing, or add attorneys and provide e-service in subsequent filings. 

In our opinion, the technology is important, but the key part of that acronym is "Service Provider".  A good EFSP provides services to support your work.

The EFM is the system that the EFSP hands your Envelope off to after we've made sure it meets all of the requirements for filing. The EFM is the part of the E-Filing system that routes your envelope to the correct court office and then allows the clerk or court staff to review and accept the envelope as a filing. This is the step where a file stamp is applied to the documents and they become available to the court. On the Court side, that means they are now in the Court's Case Management System (CMS), which you may also know as "Odyssey", or in some situations, Quest. Think of the EFM as the central hub and routing agent of the E-Filing system. Every filing goes through this hub.

For about ten years, the Indiana Courts have used an EFM supplied by Tyler Technologies, the same company that provides the Odyssey CMS. As time went on, the IOCT saw opportunities for improvements that better fit the business processes in Indiana Courts. Due to this, the IOCT has been writing their own EFM, and is planning on releasing it in late November or early December.

This is a really big deal for Doxpop, because it means we are having to re-write all of the code that connects our system to the State. We fully intend to do such a great job of that re-write that you don't even notice the switchover. However, because the EFM is so central to everything we do, we're giving you the heads-up about the change well ahead of time. This coding will require time on our end, but there is no reason to expect any interruption in services for our users. Our team is actively working on ongoing issues in addition to this project. Information regarding these issues will be addressed in a blog post in the near future.

We're not perfect, and the IOCT is not perfect, so there may be a few bumps in the road as we make this transition in late November or early December.

We'll follow this post up with a few status reports between now and then, and as the cutover date nears, we'll let you know exactly what to expect.

 

Beware of malicious emails masquerading as messages from the Indiana Courts via GovDelivery.

We received the following notice from the Indiana Supreme Court today, and are reposting it here to make sure all of our customers see it:

We are aware of a malicious email and/or text message being circulated from Indiana state agency GovDelivery accounts, including the Indiana Courts account. We no longer use GovDelivery to send email and texts. The message contains a hyperlink that is malicious in nature; do not click it.

The Indiana Office of Technology is also aware of the issue. Phishing, spoofing, and other forms of electronic crime are common and require us to remain vigilant. Get more information from FBI.gov.

To reiterate the most important part of the message above, if you receive any messages from "GovDelivery" purporting to be from the Indiana Courts or any other Indiana State office, Do not click on any links in those messages or open any attachments. 

Addressing Issues with Submitting Documents

Occasionally when submitting a new case or subsequent filing on an existing case, you may run into the issue that the lead document, and more often attachments, are in a format that the courts can not or will not accept, causing your filing to be rejected. These rejections often provide little to no information as to why the document may have been rejected or failed.

Though there can be a number of things that could cause this, one of the more common issues we run into, is the formatting of the documents. The Indiana Court System is a bit particular in regards to what type of documents it will accept: 

* 50MB is the size limit of any individual document.

* 75MB is the total size allowed for the entire envelope.

* The maximum number of pages can not exceed 250 pages for Appellate courts in the state of Indiana.

* Some fonts are not acceptable within the PDF document. (See examples below.)

Since getting a filing rejected may seem a bit arbitrary, and often the rejection message can lack the exact cause of it not being accepted, we wanted to provide a few points and tips to make this process go smoothly, at least in relation to the documents and attachments that you include in your filings.

#1 A good general rule of thumb is: If you (the submitter) did not create the lead or supporting documents in your filing, then you'll likely benefit from using a “Print to PDF function” to recreate the document(s) before submitting them. This process will often increase the size of the document, but helps by rendering unusual fonts as an image.

This is easily done by selecting the document(s), choosing the “print” option that should be available in the PDF viewing software you are using or familiar with, but instead of printing to a printer, use the drop down to select “Print to PDF”. This will create a “copy” of the original document, which you can then attach to your filing. Doing this will often fix any potential issues with the actual document, especially if you have run into the rejection wall, but are not sure why.

In general, this technique is used for attachments, since those are documents created by others, and hence must be rendered exactly, even if they include fonts unacceptable to the courts. On the other hand, lead documents will almost always be your own work, so in that case, you should just use the correct fonts (see below.) This technique can be used to fix up depositions that are created by specialized software using unusual fonts. 

#2 The Indiana Court System will only accept certain fonts in submitted documents. If  your document(s) do not use one of the fonts listed below, your documents may not be accepted:

Arial

Baskerville

Book Antiqua

Bookman

Bookman Old Style

Century

Century Schoolbook

Calisto MT

CG Times

Garamond

Georgia

New Baskerville

New Century Schoolbook

Palatino

Times New Roman

#3 Lastly, the Indiana Court System has published an E-filing guide which can be very helpful in ensuring your filings will be accepted. The E-Filing Guide provides a detailed explanation of the types and formats of documents that are allowed (and prohibited) to be submitted.  Please see pages 21 - 24 at the link below:

https://www.in.gov/courts/files/efiling-user-guide.pdf

The guide also provides instructions, if you need to submit something to the court that cannot be converted to PDF format.

Amended local rules recently approved by the Indiana Supreme Court.

The local Rules for Clark, Delaware, Johnson and Hancock County Courts have been amended. 

Local attorneys are probably aware of these, but if you're an out-of-county attorney who only files into these counties periodically, it's  worth knowing that they've changed. Note that the links below include only the amendments, not the entire local set of rules, so each is a quick read to keep you up do date.

25S-MS-10

Order Approving Amended Local Rules for Clark County

25S-MS-11
Order Approving Amended Local Rules for Delaware County

25S-MS-4
Order Approving Amended Local Rules for Johnson County

25S-MS-8
Order Approving Amended Local Rule for Hancock County

Update on EFM slowness and instability issues. Tuesday, 8/16.

Early this morning, Tyler Technologies (the State's E-Filing vendor) released a new version of their EFM*. 

This release included new logging tools that they hope will allow them to diagnose the slowdown that occurred during the last EFM upgrade on July 22nd.

Unfortunately, this current upgrade has, so far, proved to be both slower and less stable than previous verions. That is disappointing. For now, we are urging patience while Tyler works to solve the problems with this latest upgrade. They are fully aware that it's a mess and are actively working to resolve the new instability issues.

As I'm writing this post, the EFM is down, with no ETA for a fix. We hope they'll get it fixed up before the end of the day, but if you miss a filing deadline due to this instability, please refer to our previous post on how Indiana's trial rules protect you in that situation.

This is frustrating. We are now approaching one month with the EFM running at roughly 1/3 of its previous speed, and know the situation is hard on you as well. We continue to cooperate with the State and Tyler to provide the information they need for diagnosis. We also remain committed to pursuing this until it gets fixed. 

* EFM = E-Filing Manager, the system through which all filings are routed to destination courts.

Friday update on the E-Filing slowness issue.

Yesterday, (8/4) we participated in a discussion of this problem with the State's EFM* vendor (Tyler Technologies.) A few important notes from that meeting:

1) The network routing and latency issues that we had hoped might provide an explanation have been eliminated as a cause.

2) The slow response time is affecting all Indiana filers, regardless of their EFSP**.

3) More diagnostic information is needed, so early next week, Tyler will be deploying a version of the EFM that logs more information in support of the diagnostic effort.

4) The result of #3 is that we know this won't be fixed in a matter of days. It will be at least a week while the new logging software is deployed. (*sigh*)

We came away from this meeting frustrated, but with the understanding that Tyler is working diligently on this problem. They are fully aware of the pain it is causing filers, particularly those of you who submit high volumes of filings where response time is critical. We will continue to support them in their efforts by providing regular feedback from our own logging system.

* EFM = E-Filing Manager, the system through which all filings are routed to destination courts.

** EFSPs = E-Filing Service Providers, The web sites used by filers to compose and submit filing envelopes.

Tuesday update on slowness issues. Still making small incremental gains. Current hypothesis: Network routing may play a role.

 Over the weekend, Tyler Technologies shut down their system briefly to do some performance tuning on the EFM API. Now that we've got a full day of logs to examine since the most recent change, we can report that there has been a 16% decrease in the average response time compared to last Monday.😊

That's good news, and worth celebrating, but that's still over 3 times the average response time prior to their cloud migration, so this is still a top priority for us.

We've been a bit frustrated by the fact that it was a change to someone else's system that caused this. That means we're in the awkward position of just measuring slow response times and complaining instead of being able to contribute to a solution. However, one of our operations folks pointed out that network latency is something we can assess from our side of the connection, so we've been doing that and are finding some definite problems that we can use to start some diagnosis from our side of the connection. We're working that angle now, and have passed along our findings to Tyler in the hope that it will help.

Weekend update on the slowness issue- Marginal gains on Friday.

We are still not seeing anything like a return to the original performance for the E-Filing Manager API.

Some changes were made by the State's vendor early Friday afternoon that appeared to result in a small improvement, but it's hard to tell for sure because Friday afternoon is a time when our load is usually lighter than the rest of the week.

We're hoping the small gain is still discernable on Monday. However, even if this gain is solid, we acknowledge that it was small and we are not even close to calling the issue resolved. There's still far to go.

Thursday Morning update on performance issues. Bottom line: No noticeable improvements.

Early this morning (Thursday, 7/28) Tyler Technologies took the State's E-Filing Manager (EFM) off-line to do some performance tuning. We have been watching closely this morning, and as of 9AM, it looks like no improvement resulted from this work. (sigh.)

We'll be reporting these results to Tyler Technologies shortly so they can get to work on next steps.

Note that at 9AM, our sample size is fairly small, so our conclusions may be adjusted as the day unfolds, but so far, we're calling this round of tuning ineffective.

E-filing will be offline at Midnight while Tyler Technologies works on performance tuning.

We have been notified that Indiana's E-Filing Manager (EFM) will be offline for roughly one hour starting at midnight tonight (7/27/22).

That's good to hear, because as you doubtless know, the recent migration of the EFM's servers to the cloud went very poorly, and we've all been struggling with an extremely slow system this week.

Given the results of previous tries at performance tuning, we're not going to do the happy-dance yet, but we're hopeful and will wait to see what the morning brings.

If you'd like more background on this saga, take a look at our previous three posts on this topic.

Update on slowness isues with the EFM as of 1PM Tuesday, 7/26

For what has transpired up to this point, take a look at our post from last night about what caused this issue.

Here's the new information from today:

Yesterday, the State's EFM was running so slowly that it was effectively unusable. We estimate that the EFM was taking 17 times as long as usual to respond to the EFSPs such as Doxpop.

Today, it started off looking good, but a little slow. However, as of Noon today, our estimate is that the EFM is still taking 7 times as log to respond as prior to the cloud upgrade.

We have passed this information along to Tyler Technologies along with an urgent request to essentially double whatever change they made last night. That change got them halfway to the goal, so we expect it should not be hard to travel the rest of the way.

We share your frustration with this extended problem. Please know that we're doing everything we can, and at this point we're waiting on the folks at Tyler to respond.

The E-Filing outage on Friday and Monday- What happened?

 To understand this explanation, you need to know that there are two distinct sections of the E-Filing system in Indiana:

1) The section you interact with as a filer is called an E-Filing Service Provider (EFSP). The largest EFSPs in Indiana are the Tyler system, the Indiana Prosecutors' CMS, The Public Defenders' CMS and Doxpop. We provide the part of the system you interact with to get your work done.

2) Behind the scenes, all of the EFSPs connect to a single E-Filing Manager (EFM). The EFM takes the filing information that the EFSPs assemble into envelopes and write that information to the Odyssey system used by the courts. Tyler Technologies operates Indiana's EFM.

So in our case, the primary flow of data is Doxpop > EFM > Courts.

On Thursday evening, Tyler migrated Indiana's EFM to a cloud-based server. It didn't go smoothly. The result was a nearly complete outage lasting from Thursday night through the close of business on Monday. During this time, the EFM was extremely slow- Slow enough that it was essentially unusable. 

On Friday, all EFSPs were affected. Over the weekend, Tyler managed to get the connection to their EFSP working well. However, the interface used by the Prosecutors, Public Defenders, Doxpop, and other smaller EFSPs was still unusable on Monday. Doxpop reported this early Monday morning, and provided Tyler with all of the information we had available.

At 9:50 PM on Monday, Tyler reported that they completely fixed the interface used by the EFSPs, including Doxpop, that were affected on Monday. We'll be monitoring the system closely on Tuesday morning to confirm this, and ask that our users quickly report any issues they run into so we can let Tyler know if the fix applied Monday evening did the job.

Thanks to all of our users for your extraordinary patience and kindness during Friday and Monday. We were having two very bad days, but you made it a lot better by being so understanding!

Similarly, although it's tempting to point fingers, we really can't complain about the team at Tyler. Upgrades of this magnitude are no fun for anyone. They were having a very bad day too, but Tyler stuck with it until all of the issues were resolved. We appreciate that their technicians were hard at work well into the evening tonight.

Did this outage cause you to miss any filing deadlines?  If so, please read our previous blog post, which explains how the trial rules address this situation.

Did the e-file outage on Friday through Monday cause you to miss a deadline?

On Friday, July 22nd, we noticed an increasing issue with slow or completely unresponsive response times being returned by the State's E-Filing Manager, which is the central system that routes E-Filing submissions to each court. 

Doxpop promptly reported the issue to the State's vendor for this system, and received confirmation they were "aware of an issue which is affecting filings in IN Prod and are currently investigating".

As of 5PM, this problem was still not resolved, and the State's vendor indicated that they would continue working on the problem into the weekend.

If these issues caused you to miss a deadline, please note that Trial Rule 87(J)(1)(c), essentially provides for a one-day extension when a lengthy e-filing system outage or issue prevents filers from meeting a deadline.

We expect that the Trial Courts will all be aware of the scope and timing of this outage via direct communication from Trial Court Technology. However, if the court you are working with requires an affidavit from Doxpop to attach as an exhibit to the motion described in TR 86(J)(1)(c), please let us know and we'll be happy to supply documentation in support of your motion. (Simply attaching a screen print of this blog post may be sufficient.)

On the appellate side, take a look at Rule 68(M)(1)(d), which appears to be nearly identical to the Trial Court rule on this topic.