USPS Postal Rate set to increase, how will this effect Delivery by Doxpop rates?

 

As announced by the USPS earlier this year, USPS postal rates are set to increase on July 10th, 2022. We've reviewed those changes and will be updating the pricing to our Delivery by Doxpop services in line with that pricing at the end of the day on July 8th due to the update happening over the weekend.

The rate updates are detailed but in short, the only increase you will see is the actual postage increase for services that utilize the USPS. The only exception is with First Class Mail and Certified Mail flat packages. With those, you will see the per-page printing fee slightly increase as that is how we account for additional per-ounce charges. 

You can review our full Delivery by Doxpop fees on our fee schedule here. 

If you have any questions or would like more details on these updates please don't hesitate to contact Doxpop Support at 866-369-7671 or support@doxpop.com.

The Judgment Search is known to be incomplete, but still useful.

The Judgment Search is Incomplete. 

Here's an explanation of why, and what we're doing to fix it.

In August, we released our new judgment search with high hopes of providing a simple and comprehensive tool for finding judgments. It turns out we got ahead of ourselves. Here's an outline of the two significant issues we have identified, and how we're addressing them.

The context:

The data for the judgment search comes directly from the Indiana Courts. Doxpop pays the Indiana Office of Judicial Administration to send us a real-time data feed of public court information. One of the elements included in this data feed is a judgment record, which creates the Record of Judgments and Orders (RJO) book for county clerks. It is this judgment record that we search for when you do a judgment search.

What we got wrong:

(1) The data feed from the State Courts is incorrectly formatted. The issue is that when multiple judgment records exist on a case, the Court is sending us just one of the records. The Court IT folks quickly agreed that this is wrong and they are working helpfully with us to resolve that problem. Fixing this is a big project that will take more than a month.

(2) Because the judgment records drive the process to create the RJO book automatically, we expected that every court would make judgment entries. We were wrong. Some courts aren't using this tool to report judgments, so we can't do a complete judgment search in their counties.

How we'll resolve the problem:

The data feed issue described above is in the process of being resolved. There's a lot of work involved, but the solution is clear. When the judgment records are coming in correctly via the State Court data feed, we'll be able to tell you that the judgment search is complete for the counties that enter judgment records.

The second issue is a more complex one because we can't control the court's choices about internal business processes. Every court in Indiana that hears civil cases has a tool that will make their work easier... but we can't force them to use it. What we can do is survey the courts and give you a verified list of the courts that are entering the judgment records, and the date they started. We're in the process of doing that survey now, and will be releasing information about the participating counties shortly.

What you should do until both problems are fixed:

A regular case search on Doxpop will reliably return cases that a person is involved in statewide, and by visually scanning the minute entries, you can locate the entries noting when a judgment has been rendered. This is the way it's been done for years, so stick to the old reliable methods until we have a better solution. To make sure you search for every variation on a name, we suggest that you use our "super search" tool or do wildcard searching.

Why is the judgment search still useful?

We suggest still doing a judgment search in addition to a regular case search because although the judgment search is incomplete, every record it returns is definitely a judgment against the name you searched for. Doing a judgment search only takes a few seconds and may locate a judgment you missed with your visual scan of minute entries. Redundancy is useful when doing a thorough job is important.

Doxpop's Fine Payment has been retired

Doxpop is no longer contracted to take traffic or citation payments for any counties in Indiana and the service has been retired as of January 1st, 2022.

If you found this post looking to pay a traffic ticket issued in an Indiana county here are some suggestions:

• Most counties are payable on the Indiana State Court payment site at public.courts.in.gov so start there. We suggest allowing 7-14 days to pass for the ticket to be payable. 
• If you are unable to find or pay your ticket at that site please call the clerk of courts in the county the ticket was issued. 
• If you are unsure of the county, look at which court the ticket was assigned to and the first part of that court name will be the county or municipality the ticket was assigned to. 

Holiday Doxpop Closings. We're wishing all of you a great holiday season!

In observance of the holiday season Doxpop offices and support will be closed for the following upcoming holidays:

Thursday, December 23rd

Friday, December 24th

Friday, December 31st

That said, our support doesn't entirely stop just because of the holidays. We understand that sometimes our users may have an emergency situation during a holiday so here's how to get help if you need it while we are closed:

We will not be monitoring phone lines, so you must use email. One of our managers will be checking email periodically throughout the holiday break. If you have a real emergency, please send an email to support@doxpop.com that contains a brief description of the problem and a 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 we're back to the office.

Randolph County Courts Convert to Odyssey, completing the conversion of all Indiana county courts- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected!

Over the weekend of December 11th, the Courts in Randolph County will convert to the Odyssey case management system, which means their Case Management System is now administered by Indiana Trial Court Technology along with all of Indiana's county courts. 

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 Randolph County court information or your ability to e-file through Doxpop will not change or be interpreted 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 Randolph 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 January 10th, 2022. 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.

Switzerland County Courts Convert to Odyssey- Your Doxpop Access is Unaffected!

   

Over the weekend of December 4th, the Courts in Switzerland County will convert to the Odyssey case management system, which 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 Switzerland County court information or your ability to e-file through Doxpop will not change or be interpreted 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 Switzerland 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 January 3rd, 2022. 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 24th 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, November 29th. 

A bug in the Clerk's Review Module is causing some documents to appear rotated. (It's not your fault!)

 A couple of Doxpop E-Filers have reported that the documents they uploaded appear to be rotated 90 degrees when the clerk reviews them. One person had their filing rejected because of this. This happens most frequently to people who scan their documents rather than saving to PDF directly from their word processor

Doxpop's support team investigated and learned that a recently released "upgrade" to the Clerk's Review Module has a bug that causes documents that are actually oriented correctly to display badly in the Clerk's office. The bottom line is that your documents are fine, and the problem is with software on the receiving end of the system.

If a clerk or court rejects your filing as "illegible" because it is displayed sideways, please refer them to Indiana Trial Court Technology. TCT is the group that provides technical support to the clerks and they will confirm that there's no problem with your documents and they should be accepted.

 

E-Filing may be unavailable during the Holiday weekend of Friday, 10/8 through Monday, 10/11.

During the upcoming Holiday weekend, Indiana Court Technology is rolling out a significant upgrade of the court-facing side of the Odyssey case management system. They have notified us that E-filing may be unavailable for subsequent filings during this process.

Here's what this means for Doxpop users:

None of our public access systems will be affected by this outage. You can continue to do searches for court cases, recorded documents, and tax warrants without interruption.

Our system relies on the State's EFM to accept e-filing submissions, so E-Filing on existing cases may be unavailable at times starting 8pm Friday, but the message from Court Technology says that it will be available for new filings and that work should wrap up Saturday.  We suggest that you go ahead and try to use the e-filing system as needed. If we can't connect to the EFM, nothing is lost because your envelope will be saved and you can just resubmit it later when the system is back up.

This potential outage window begins at 8 PM on Friday, October 8 and ends at 10 PM on Monday, October 11th.

Our office will be open on Monday, so if you encounter problems that aren't explained by the message above, or have other questions, please don't hesitate to email support@doxpop.com or give us a call at 866-369-7671.

How the USPS service changes affect Delivery by Doxpop customers

 

On Oct 1st, 2021 the US Postal Service implemented new service standards for First-Class Mail (FCM) along with some slight rate increases. We reviewed these changes and found they may affect users of our Delivery by Doxpop service. 

Here is a summary:

Service time-

Doxpop uses several different printing and mailing facilities in order provide a reliable, high quality, and cost-effective service. Our primary FCM facilities are located in Michigan and Arizona. 

Per the USPS announcement, FCM may now take 3-4 days for a piece of FCM to make it to its destination instead of 2-3 days in their previous service commitment. These new service standards describe the level of service we've often experienced this year, so we don't feel this change will amount to much difference in the delivery times you already see. 

If time is important we continue to suggest using the priority mail options which will continue a 1-2 day range delivery within Indiana. Note that Certified Mail is considered First-Class Mail, so we expect delivery times to mirror what we see with regular FCM along with delivery via FCM of sheriff's service. 

We will continue to monitor delivery times and if we see delivery times from the USPS slowing even further, we'll explore possible updates or changes to see if we can speed up that time.   

Costs-

Along with this change in service standards, the USPS announced a few minor increases in postage rates at least through the end of the year. Doxpop is committed to providing Delivery by Doxpop services at a reasonable rate and we want to ensure we have done our due diligence before adjusting the rates we charge for this service. We expect that we will have to increase our rates to compensate for increased costs, and will announce those once that decision is made. 

Our customers shape our services so if you have any feedback on how this may affect your business we want to hear about it. Contact our support team at 866-369-7671 or support@doxpop.com with any questions or comments.