CCS (minute entries) now displayed in reverse chronological order.

Last night we made a little tweak to the court record system that is simple, but will make your life easier by saving you a couple of seconds on each case you look at.

Minute entries for cases are now listed in reverse chronological order, so you will see the most recent entry at the top, and oldest at the bottom.

For attorneys, this means what's happening now is the first thing you see.

For researchers, this means the judgment information you seek should be near the top instead of requiring you to scroll to the bottom.

No solution is perfect for everyone, so many of you will still need to navigate quickly through the entries. When you do this, remember that all web browsers have nice shortcuts you can use to quickly move to the desired entry:

• The [Home] key (above the arrows on most keyboards) will position you at the top of the page.  On mini-keyboards, [fn]-[up-arrow] is used instead.

• The [End] key (above the arrows on most keyboards) will position you at the bottom of the page.  On mini-keyboards, [fn]-[down-arrow] is used.

• The [PgUp] and [PgDn] keys (above the arrows on most keyboards) will scroll up or down one screenful at a time.

• To quickly find entries containing a particular word, press [Ctrl]-[F] and then start typing the word. You will be positioned on the first occurrence and all occurrences will be highlighted.

"Super Search" comes to the Recorder/Register tabs.

For just a little over a month now, "Super Search" has been available to folks searching under the Court Record and Tax Warrant tabs. On Monday (4/24), we are adding Super Search to the tools available in the Recorded Document & Register of Deeds tab.

For people who are used to using the traditional search, it is important to know that you can turn the super search on or off using the check box. Your search setting is "sticky", meaning it stays on whichever type of search you selected until you change the setting. 

If you have several rush orders to do today and don't want to learn a new search tool, just leave the box un-checked and get on with your day. However, if you've got a few free minutes, give it a try. Super Search can make your job a lot easier once you get used to it.

For complete details about how super search behaves, take a look at this blog post from February 28.

Coming Soon: Keep an eye out for an announcement about "Full Text Search" soon. This new feature will allow you to find documents by searching for keywords found in the document- even if they aren't part of the index!

Change in e-filing subject lines: "Filing Submitted" becomes "Notice of electronic filing"

A few people have called us in confusion today, because the subject line for notification that a submitted filing was received has changed (again).

These emails now have a subject line beginning "Notice of electronic filing...", and in the upper right corner of the email, the big bold title says "Notice of Electronic Filing" as well.

Don't worry, it's the same thing as the emails that used to say "Filing Submitted".

This is the second time the subject line of these emails has changed, but we really like this change, because now the subject line matches up perfectly with the terminology used in trial rule 86(E), which says you should retain "each Notice of Electronic Filing".

We're sorry we didn't give you warning about this! The folks at the State forgot to tell us it was about to happen, so we were surprised as well. 😉

Vanderburgh service payments, and how to make sure the Sheriff knows you paid for service in any county.

How to pay the fee:
First, for those of you who have been frustrated when trying to pay Sheriff service fees in Vanderburgh, the problem has been solved. This was due to a minor configuration error in the State's system, and they just took care of it for us a couple of days ago. (Thanks!)

This means that when you file a summons in Vanderburgh County, at the bottom of the window where you upload your summons, you now have the option to add Sheriff's service:

How to prove to the Sheriff that you paid the fee.
This question has come up several times in Vanderburgh County, but this approach works for any county: When you submit an initial filing for a case, you will receive a "Notice of electronic filing" for each document. The first one of these you receive, (which is not necessarily the one for the summons) will show the fee details. Print that email, highlight the part that shows the Sheriff's fee, and attach it to the front of  three copies of the paperwork to be served, and send or hand-deliver it to the Sheriff's office.  [Update: on 7/11, we learned that you should also include the Notice of Acceptance. Details here.]

As always, please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions about this or any other aspect of e-filing. Call 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com. We are here to help. 

Resources for E-Filers. Forms and Local Procedures

There are a couple of support requests that we receive regularly now that e-filing is well under way. The first is help with locating sample forms. The second is what the local rules and processes are when they vary from the basic rules outlined at the state level.

We'll list the resources we've found for both of these below. To find what you need quickly, user your browser's "search in page" function (usually Control-F) to search for a county or keyword for a document.

We'll update this post as we come across new resources, so bookmark it as a reference moving forward, and please let us know if there's a resource we should add.

Forms:

As a general rule, remember to never combine more than one document in a single PDF file. Many older forms combined several documents, and that makes it hard for the e-filing system to route them correctly.

Collections of forms:

• Forms created by Richard Mann. 
• Forms for Allen County (Small Claims, Probate)

Appearance:

• State Court (Civil)
• Allen County (General)
• Allen County (Civil, pro se)

Certificate of Issuance of Summons

• Richard Mann (General)
• Allen County

Notice of Exclusion from Public Access

• State Court

Return of Service of Summons 

(Note- Trial Rule 86(G)(2)(d)(i) allows you to direct the return receipt for certified or registered mail directly to the clerk, avoiding the need to file this form. However, if you should opt to have the receipt come to your office, this is a form you may use to identify the scanned receipt.)

• Allen County (Personal Acknowledgement, Sheriff, and Receipt for mail)

Local Rules/Procedure

• Allen County Probate

Searching by Government Lot now available in Michigan

Our searchers in Iosco County, Michigan have been using a field as part of their title research called Government Lot that designates a legal description as being waterfront property. When the Register of Deeds switched to CSI and Doxpop for their county, the field was entirely new to our systems.

We're happy to have this field available now, both as a searchable field and as part of the legal description we display to make sorting parcels of land easier for those users.

Thank you to all of our new partners for your patience in getting this added, and please let us know what else we can do to make your research process work more efficiently!

Doxpop's transition to the new Tax Warrant service is complete.

If you are not already using the "tax warrant" tab for all of your tax warrant research, it is time to make the switch. At 5:30 AM on Friday, 3/31/17, we will be turning off access to tax warrants through the "court cases" tab. From about 5:30 AM to 5:45 AM the site will be down while we install an update that includes this change.

On February 9th, Doxpop introduced a new tab that our subscribers can use to search for Tax Warrants across the entire state with a single search. Prior to our investment in this new service, we were only able to provide tax warrants in 23 out of the 92 counties, so this service increases our geographical coverage to roughly 4 times that of the previous service.

During the introduction of this service, we continued to provide access to the tax warrants that were available through our old court records service while we gathered feedback on the new tax warrant tab. The main feedback we got was that although most of those who tried the new "Super Search" method of searching for tax warrants loved it, those who had built their search procedures around our traditional searching tools hated it.

In response to this feedback, on February 28th we added the ability to search the statewide tax warrant database using either the Super Search or our traditional search tools. We have now had this service running in parallel with the old service for a month with both search options enabled, and our users are reporting consistent and accurate results.

That means it is time to turn off the old service and ask you all to begin using the new "tax warrants" for your searching these records. From this point forward, tax warrants will not be commingled with court records, and you will only be able to find them through the "tax warrant" tab.

The folks who are accessing tax warrants through the court api service will continue to have access to the tax warrants from the original smaller group of counties through the api because we don't yet provide an api for tax warrants.

Change in Monroe County Sheriff Service fees

The Monroe County Clerk's Office would prefer that sheriff fees for service be paid directly to the sheriff. They are still accepting these fees in their office when necessary, but would like to no longer need to accept them over the coming weeks.

Please begin to submit your service fees to the sheriff, even though the option to pay this through E-Filing may remain for a short while.

Thank you!

Boone County added to Doxpop Courts, Tippecanoe Live on E-Filing, with a twist...

Doxpop has just added the Boone County Trial Courts to our database of current court records. Court case Information is available for Boone County Circuit Court, Superior Courts 1 & 2 from January 1994 forward and Zionsville Town Court for September 2013 forward. All Doxpop services are now available for these courts. This includes services like having your hearing calendar delivered directly to your mobile device or office calendaring system and setting alerts on cases.

Also in recent news, Hancock, Tippecanoe and Wabash County Courts have all commenced e-filing. We welcome them to the group of courts that Doxpop provides E-Filing services for!

Tippecanoe has an interesting twist that you should be aware of. They are the first county to implement the E-Filing system using the "Quest" CMS, which many counties use to manage their juvenile cases. 

That means three things for those using Doxpop to e-file in Tippecanoe:

1. When filing a new juvenile case, in the "Location" selection, choose "Tippecanoe County (Quest)" from the drop-down menu. 
2. When a new case that is anything other than juvenile, choose "Tippecanoe County (Odyssey)" from the drop-down menu.
3. When looking up a confidential juvenile case to submit a subsequent filing, use the "Find E-Filable Cases" menu item under the "my doxpop" tab.

Let us know if you have any questions about how the separate Tippecanoe location entries function. If you are in one of the counties that recently started e-filing, give us a call lo learn how to begin e-filing through Doxpop and obtain training at no cost! 

Call 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com.

Vanderburgh Sheriff fees to be paid through clerk's office until end of April.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a note that the intended switch to paying Sheriff's Service fees directly to the Sheriff in Vanderburgh had been delayed. Today we learned that they will be accepting these fees only through the clerk's office at least through the end of April.

Why April? The clerk has wisely opted to make no changes until the close of the legislative session, because there is some hope that the legislature will clarify the rules for collecting this fee.

This information and a few other useful e-filing tips for folks from Vanderburgh can be found at the Evansville Bar Association website.