Please vote now to avoid having to decide whether it is safe to vote later.

This is way outside of our usual purview, but important enough to take a moment for...

Indiana has rescheduled the primary election this year to June 2nd in an effort to get well past the peak of COVID-19 danger. There is still some uncertainty around what the procedures will be for in-person voting, and of course no way to know what the pandemic situation will be.

However, in the meantime, there is no reason you can't go ahead and cast an absentee ballot now so you know your vote will be counted even if the situation on June 2nd makes it difficult to safely vote in person.

To obtain an absentee ballot, you must fill out an application and mail it to your local Clerk's election office. The election office must receive this form on or before May 21, 2020, so don't wait. Do it now.

 This special form for the June 2020 election does not require that you state a reason for needing to vote absentee. Fill out the first page carefully, and then look on the second page to find the address of your county election office.

You can download the form at this link: ABS-MAIL PRIMARY 2020

Welcome to the Newton County Recorder!

Doxpop is happy to celebrate our newest partner, and announce that the Newton County Recorder's Office is now available online!

Newton County is the 44th Recorder to join Doxpop

Land records in Newton County begin with images in 1989, but are fully indexed beginning in 2003. Many name indexes are available and full document text search will help accessing older records as they are being indexed by the county.

Please extend your thanks to Janice Wilson, the Newton County Recorder, and to the county for their assistance to make this important public access available during these new and uncertain times.

Anyone wishing to look up recorded documents on-line may visit http://www.doxpop.com to use the service. A low-volume search plan is available for free, with higher-volume subscriptions available to commercial users for a fee. Access to document pages may be viewed and purchased through our system, and $1 per page will be remitted to the Recorder for each copy obtained.

New Tax Warrants Paused by the State

** Final UPDATE: In July 2020, the Indiana Department of Revenue released a plan for returning to normal operation using a phased approach that was completed in October 2020. As of November 2020, Tax Warrant processing is back to normal pre-pandemic operating procedures. 

The "Back on Track" document that outlined the phased approach to returning to normal is available here: DOR_Back_On_Track_Plan.pdf

**

**
UPDATE 4/13/2020: We notice that new tax warrants and satisfactions have not stopped completely, but have slowed to a trickle in most counties. The Indiana DOR has indicated that they are continuing to take action in situations facing statutes of limitation. Please check for new warrants and satisfactions if your business depends on it. Doxpop continues to make new information available as soon as we receive it from the state.

More details about what the Indiana Department of Revenue is doing to assist Hoosiers with COVID-19 relief can be found here: https://calendar.in.gov/site/dor/event/dor-announces-helping-hoosiers-covid-19-relief-services
**

Original Post 3/25/2020:

Doxpop was notified this morning that given the current situation with COVID-19, the Indiana Department of Revenue has temporarily paused the sending of new tax warrants to be processed by County Circuit Court Clerks. This means we'll all see a drop-off in new tax warrants almost immediately across all counties until further notice. Once the Indiana DOR decides to resume sending tax warrants, we'll be notified and Doxpop's system will begin receiving new tax warrants as soon as they are available.

Researchers: Note that until a warrant is sent to the Circuit Court Clerk for recording, it does not become a judgment/lien. [ See IC 6-8.1-8-2(e) ]

For more information from the DOR, please visit https://www.in.gov/dor/ and check back here for updates.

For warrant-related questions or payments where county offices are unavailable, the DOR can be reached by phone at 317-232-2240 or through payment options at https://dorpay.dor.in.gov. If you have questions or concerns about Doxpop's tax warrant services, please contact us at 866-369-7671 or support@doxpop.com.

New e-filing pages are here! All the training resources are linked in this post.

On Tuesday, March 24th we released our updated e-filing pages!

We know change can be challenging at first so we've prepared a whole group of various resources to help you navigate the new pages.

Videos:

• Introduction to Doxpop's New E-Filing Process
• Submitting an initial filing to the court using Doxpop
• Submitting a subsequent filing to the court using Doxpop

Updated Help Pages:

• Filing a New Case
• Filing into an Existing Case

Other Resources:

Rest assured that our support team is and will be here, ready to help you through the transition even with the other challenges facing the world.

• phone: 866-369-7671
• email: support@doxpop.com
• live chat: Click here

We're and also happy to offer remote or in-person training sessions free of charge. Just contact a member of our support team for more details. 

E-filing pages are about to get a whole new look and many improvements! Prepare now.

Doxpop’s focus has always been on making your work efficient and user-friendly, especially when it comes to e-filing. After over a year of hard work by our developers and testing teams, we are nearing the release of major updates that will incorporate a number of improvements you’ve suggested over the past three years of e-filing.

We know change can be challenging, so we wanted to give you some advance notice and a look at those changes before we released them. Also, rest assured that our support team is and will be here, ready to help you through the transition even with the other challenges facing the world.

This release is scheduled for Tuesday, March 24th. We strongly encourage you to check the video before that date to familiarize yourself with the new pages. We'll have more in-depth training videos posted soon.

Introduction to Doxpop's New E-Filing Process

Updated: Click here for a list of all our training resources. 

These updates will include new looks, new layout and added features in both initial filing and subsequent filing pages. Below is a list of some of the features we’ve added along with some screenshots of the new pages.

• Clearer listing of required roles in new cases
• Streamlined service contact attachment
• Document uploading is streamlined
• Document previews
• Add attachments at the same time as lead documents. 
• We added more logic to provide defaults for fields based on previous behavior
• Easier to read pages 

Providing default values for repetitive fields is one of the biggest improvements, however, we couldn't do this for every field. For instance, many users suggested that we default the document security to "public". After some thought, we decided that while speed is important so is your client's privacy. We know that inadvertently submitting a confidential document as public to the court can end up being more harmful than the small amount of time to confirm that each document is public or confidential. The result is that this is one field we did not create a default for.

Filing into an existing case

Filing a new case

Adding a document/filing

Pulaski & White Counties Convert to Odyssey- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected!

On March 16th, the Courts in Pulaski & White Counties converted to the Odyssey case management 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 Pulaski and White Counties 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 Decatur 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 April 25th. 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.

Getting support from Doxpop as we all take steps to stay healthy.

Like all responsible businesses, Doxpop is planning for continuity of excellent service while taking appropriate measures to protect our employees and their families from COVID-19.

We are pleased to report that currently, we are all healthy and just joining the rest of the world by being cautious and planning ahead.

If we have a community outbreak of COVID-19 in our area, or become aware that any employees have been exposed, we will have our staff begin working from home until the outbreak has run its course.

In the event that we have to start working from home you will probably notice no difference in our support except for the occasional dog barking in the background. We are privileged to be in a business that allows us to work remotely when the need arises, so we'll do our best to make sure Doxpop is not a part of the problem.

If we do adjust anything about our support procedures, it will be noted in the yellow banner area at the top of our web site that we use for important announcements.

Update on 3/14/20:

As of today, we have taken preemptive measures to slow the spread in our community by encouraging most of our employees to work from home beginning on Monday, 3/16.

That means that beginning Monday most of our support staff will be answering phone calls, emails and chat requests from home. We tested this plan out on Friday and it seems to be working well, but please let us know via email if you are having any trouble reaching our phone support.

Don't hesitate to provide feedback if you have any thoughts on how this affects the quality of the support you receive. We are committed to our employee's health and supporting our public health officials, but as long as those two commitments aren't compromised, we're open to ideas about fine-tuning our support plan.

Here is what you need to know about the Odyssey downtime that affected e-filing on Thursday, Feb. 13th.

Update 4:20pm Feb 14th: The state has confirmed all connection issues between Odyssey and the E-file system have been fixed.
Original Post Below:

Beginning at roughly 10:45am on Thursday, February 13th, the Odyssey Case Management system began experiencing sporadic outages and issues, thus preventing the e-file system from being able to retrieve some cases. We have received confirmation of the issues from the Office of Judicial Administration that the issue extended through the end of the working day. At the time of this posting, it appears that the issue has been resolved overnight but we still await confirmation. 

If you are reading this and missed a deadline yesterday, please note that Trial Rule 86(N)(1), essentially provides for a one-day extension when a lengthy e-filing system outage 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 a statement from Doxpop to attach as an exhibit to the motion described in TR 86(N)(1)(d), 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.

Decatur County Converts to Odyssey- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected!

On February 9th, the Courts in Decatur County converted to the Odyssey case management 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 Decatur 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 Decatur 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 March 9th. 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.

Congratulations to the Whitewater Valley Pro Bono Commission!

Doxpop is proud to be a part of the local community that supports the Whitewater Valley Pro Bono Commission. In 2019, Doxpop provided a challenge to our friends: Through the Doxpop Charitable Giving Fund, we would match all donations made during the Pro Bono Commission's year-end fund drive up to $7,500.

The Whitewater Valley Pro Bono Commission met and significantly exceeded that challenge by bringing in $14,305. Doxpop will add $7,500 to that amount, bringing the total for this fund drive to  $21,805.

Congratulations to Shane Eddington, the Attorney Administrator of WWVPBC, and its distinguished board members. Writing a check is gratifying, but being actively involved in directing this organization is the greater contribution. Thanks to all of you for making WWVPBC an organization we can trust and support without hesitation.

If you know one of the board members, please take a moment to thank them for their service to our community. They are:

John Maley, President,  Barnes and Thornburg

A.J. Sickmann, Vice-President, Boston, Bever, Klinge, Cross and Chidester

Donald Hawk, Treasurer, US Bank Trust Department 

Beth Bell of DeFur Voran

Bill Engle retired from Palladium Item

Ann Holzer of Meridian Services

Amy Jarecki of Indiana University 

D.Bruce Kehoe of Wilson, Kehoe, and Winningham LLC

Mark Maddox of Maddox, Hargett and Caruso, P.C.

Doug Masson of Hoffman, Luhman and Masson, P.C.

Craig C. Parker of Parker Law Office

Phil Quinn of 101.7 FM

Kevin Schiferl of Frost, Brown and Todd

Judge P. Thomas Snow, Senior Judge

Jennifer Struck of Unity Healthcare

Becky Studebaker of Genesis

Brian Swiger of Williams and Keckler

Jim Thompson of Lynch Thompson LLP

Nancy Wissel of Wissel Law Office