Daviess and Newton Counties Convert to Odyssey- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected!

On December 2nd, the Courts in Daviess & Newton Counties converted to the Odyssey case tracking system, this means their Case Management System is now administered by Indiana Trial Court Technology.

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 Daviess and Newton 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 a four-six 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 Daviess or Newton 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 December 23rd. 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.

Doxpop offices will close 5pm EST Wednesday, November 27th in observance of Thanksgiving.

We understand that sometimes you have to deal with an emergency situation during a holiday so here's how to get help over the holiday:

We will not be monitoring phone lines, so you must use email. One of our managers will be checking email periodically throughout the Thanksgiving break. If you have a real emergency, please send an email to support@doxpop.com which contains a brief description of the problem and phone number we can call to reach you.

Please be respectful when using this option. It's for real emergencies that can't wait until Monday morning.

Our offices will re-open at 8am on Monday, December 2nd. 

Search results that are too large will no longer be partially displayed

In the past, when a Doxpop user submitted a query that resulted in too many records to display, we showed some of the returned records with a warning at the top saying that the displayed results were incomplete.

Recently a researcher pointed out to us that displaying partial results is misleading. Even with the warning, a person might think that because the records appear to be in order, they are complete list of the first "chunk" in whatever order they appear. This is not true. The list really is incomplete, sometimes containing a gap in the records displayed. Therefore nobody should depend on it. We just displayed it because we thought it would feel better for people to see they were getting some results.

That was a bad idea. We're sorry and we're fixing it.

From now on, if you submit a query that would return more than 500 records, (for Recorded Documents) or 1,000 records (for Court Cases & Tax Warrants) Doxpop will just display a message explaining that the query was too broad. You'll need to narrow down the results by adding constraints to decrease the number of records returned. There are several good strategies for narrowing down results:

• On the court side, consider looking only for the type of case you are interested in, or searching only for pending or disposed cases. 
• Searching for one county or region of counties at a time will significantly narrow results. (Here's how to search a region.)
• On the recorded document side, consider only searching for a particular type of document or group of types. 
• Searching for date ranges is useful if you really want to sift through thousands of results, and want to break it into chunks. 

 Why do we even put limits on the size of searches? It's simple enough. We charge by the search, and just like you, we need to make a living. We think providing 500 or more results per search is good value, and allowing more would invite abuse of our system by people using automated "screen scrapers" to gather data. In addition, the government offices we source the information from require that we not make bulk data available through our web site. This is a reasonable concern to prevent data mining efforts by people who are up to no good. For these two reasons, we have a policy limiting results to what we think a human can reasonably scan visually.

As always, let us know if this change has affected you in a way that we didn't intend.  We're always trying to make this system better, and your feedback is our best test of how we're doing. You can comment below, or better yet, just call 866-369-7671 so we can talk about how to best support your business processes.

Search results are now back to one full list rather than multiple pages.

On 11/6/19 Doxpop released some updates to the display of search results on Recorded Documents, Register of Deeds and Tax Warrant pages that removed the results being present in a set of multiple pages that the user could select, up to 100, on how many they see. Now they will show in one complete list up the maximum number of results we return.

We made this change after receiving feedback from a number of users that presenting the results in that way was hindering effective workflows.

If you have any questions or feedback for us feel free to send an email to support@doxpop.com or give us a call at 866-369-7671

Vigo County recorded document data incomplete (Now fixed!)

Update: This has been fixed! If you did any searches based on legal descriptions in Vigo County between 10/7 and 10/25, please re-run those and let us know how many searches you had to re-run so we can credit your account for them.

Doxpop just learned that Vigo County's recorder server has not been sending us legal descriptions since 10/7/19. We are working with their indexing system vendor to resolve this, but in the meantime, any searches based on legal description (Section/Township/Range or Subdivision/Lot) will not return documents filed after 10/7. You can still search on any other indexed fields, but obviously this severely limits the use of our system for this county. We'll be sure to post more information as soon as we have a plan for recovering this data! Keep an eye out for the yellow message alert area in the top of our web site for further notices.

Printing of recorded document and register of deeds results improved.

You spoke, Doxpop listened!

We've revamped the printing of the results in the recorded document and register of deeds section of our site. As a result, the search results text is slightly smaller and closer to the size we originally had on that page.

Old Print View

New Print View

Validation Date Added:
In addition when printing searches on specific counties we've also added the validation information you needed on the printed results. 

Recorded Document Searching: It's fixed and has new abilities!

Most of our Recorder and Register of Deeds users are aware of some issues with the default sorting since we rolled out a number of new features to those portions of our site. We apologize for the inconvenience these couple of issues caused and wanted to let everyone know we've gone ahead and released some fixes and an enhanced sorting feature.

Introducing the "secondary" sorting feature, allowing you to sort the results by multiple levels.

The big difference you will notice is column headings that are involved in the sort will be colored indicating the columns used to sort the list.

Default Sort:
When you perform a search we will now sort the results in the same order we did prior to the main update.

Party name search:
- Full name
- Document Recorded Date
- Document Public ID

Other search criteria:
- Document Recorded Date
- Document Public ID

Name Search default sort

Custom Sorting
You can use this feature to create your own custom sort of search results by clicking on the first column you want to search by, then hold the shift key and click on the next column you want to sort by.

Custom sort (legal, type, date)

We hope this helps you work more efficiently and if you have any questions or feedback feel free to contact us at support@doxpop.com or call us at 866-369-7671. 

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.

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.

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.