10 Million Cases!

10 Million Cases! Doxpop reached this impressive milestone early this morning. Doxpop now provides access to over 10 million cases from 138 courts in 46 Indiana counties.

We would like to thank all Doxpop partner courts, county officials, and our loyal subscribers for helping make this possible. We at Doxpop remain determined to provide you with the most valuable, accurate, and timely access to the public records you need. Keep an eye out for additional counties and service features to be added in the near future.

Fun Fact:

Assuming that each CCS is about two pages, all cases stacked on top of each other would reach approximately 5,833 feet. That's taller than 3 Sears Towers!

Thank you for using Doxpop.

Allen Criminal Records Now On Doxpop

Doxpop is pleased to announce that the Allen County Criminal Court Records are now available on Doxpop. Searches in Allen County will now include Civil and Criminal cases.

The court information available for Allen County includes all court cases filed beginning in October of 1995 and any older cases still open at that time.

Tax Warrants are filed under the MI case type and begin in November of 1995. Foreign Judgments (in and out of state) are also filed under the MI case type.

Clerk's records are complete for all civil cases. However, the Superior Courts of Allen County do not enter all actions on the electronic CCS. For a more detailed explanation of what information is available for each of the civil case types in the Allen County courts, consult this PDF chart.

Allen and the many other counties working with Doxpop help serve the public interest by making information available via the web at no cost to the county. Doxpop provides a range of tools designed to facilitate timely and efficient communication between county agencies and those who use county data.

Doxpop has been providing public access to Indiana court records since 2002 and Indiana recorded documents since 2005. The Doxpop network consists of 46 Indiana court systems and currently provides access to over 9.9 million court case records and over 2.8 million recorded documents.

Doxpop submits 798-page request for access to public information from Indiana Courts

On Friday, January 9, 2009, Doxpop shipped off its 798-page 2009 AR-9(F) request (pdf) for access to non-confidential case information in Indiana. Doxpop works with county clerks and judges to publish information about court cases on the Internet as permitted by Trial Rule 77(K) (html). Bulk access to court case information is governed by Administrative Rule 9(F) (html) and certain administrative authority under the rule is granted to the Division of State Court Administration, Lilia Judson, Executive Director.

In addition to a cover letter and a few pages of information specific to our request, the Division requires that we attach: 1) orders of consent from judges in each county from which we receive information, 2) copies of contracts with each county from which we receive information, and 3) copies of contracts with anyone to whom we provide bulk data. With about 50 counties participating in the Doxpop network, and 5 other organizations that receive bulk data via Doxpop, the paperwork adds up quickly.

But wait, there's more. There's another 4000 pages to submit before January 31. Each county that utilizes Doxpop to publish information on the Internet under TR-77(K) must also submit its own paperwork to the Division. This includes: 1) orders of consent from the judges in the county, 2) a copy of the contract with the county, and 3) detailed information about the Doxpop service and its user agreements. This adds up to about 80 pages per county. To facilitate the process, Doxpop prepares this paperwork for submission by the clerk.

It's worth noting that the consent orders and contracts in each TR-77(K) request are identical to the ones submitted by Doxpop in its AR-9(F) request. And the information about the Doxpop services is identical in each TR-77(K) request. All of this needs to be completed between January 1 and January 31: new consent orders from the judges, new AR-9(F) request from Doxpop, approval by the Division of Doxpop's request, and new TR-77(K) requests by each clerk. All of this at a busy time of year, especially for judges and clerks who just took office.

As you can see from the cover letter, Doxpop has some concerns about how the Division has chosen to interpret the rules. I'll say more about that in upcoming blog entries. For now I'll suggest that the current process is poorly designed, at best, or designed to frustrate clerks, judges, and counties who have not switched to the state-provided case management system, at worst. In the letter sent to clerks last year (pdf), the second paragraph seems to imply the latter.

Of course we comply with the process prescribed by the Division, but surely there's a better way.

Ray

Kosciusko Recorded Documents Join Doxpop

Doxpop is pleased to welcome the Kosciusko County Recorder as the newest local government information provider in the Doxpop community.

The Kosciusko County document index extends back to January of 1991 and the Kosciusko County document images extend back to January of 1997.

Kosciusko and the many other counties working with Doxpop help serve the public interest by making information available via the web at no cost to the county. Doxpop provides a range of tools designed to facilitate timely and efficient communication between county agencies and those who use county data.

Doxpop has been providing public access to Indiana court records since 2002 and Indiana recorded documents since 2005. Kosciusko County is the 7th Recorder's office to join the Doxpop network, which currently provides access to over 9.0 million court case records and over 2.8 million recorded documents.

The Cost of Free Goes Higher.

A bit of irony: Exactly one week after I posted the accumulated cost of the system that supports "free" access to court information in Indiana, we have received word from a representative of the Association of Indiana Counties that the Court's proposal to the Indiana State Budget Committee this morning includes a request for a 42% increase in the Court Record Automation Fee. (Pull out your calculators and look at my last post to see how much that adds to the cost of "free".)

Oddly, that's not even the most interesting aspect of the proposal. It sounds like they're proposing eliminating elected clerks. I'll try to obtain a copy of the proposal and post it here along with more thorough analysis when it becomes available. Until then, here's a quote with the highlights:

"Today the Supreme Court announced their budget proposal to the State Budget Committee. The proposal included the appointment of clerks by the state, probation fees absorbed by the state, and a $7-10 fee increase for the JTAC Odyssey system."

Update: I have now obtained a partial copy of the budget proposal. Many pages are missing, so I'll wait until I have a clean copy to post it. Here are a few figures:

On page 12, the proposal requests that the automated record keeping fee "be increased by $3 to $10 per case filed, effective July 1, 2009."

The bottom line on the entire budget is that the Court intends to increase its spending overall from an estimated $136,180,673 in FY '08-'09 to $164,133,297 in FY'09-'10. An increase of roughly 28 million dollars. Since they expect less of this to be funded by "dedicated" funds, this will translate to about $32.7 million more out of State "general" (tax) funds.

TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)

I noticed a couple of blog posts yesterday that fit together to paint an interesting picture and raise important questions about public policy.

First, on the blog of the Indiana Courts Judicial Automation and Technology Committee, we learned that October represented a record month for the Odyssey public access site, with "an average of 245 different users every day of the month." The post ends with "Access public records 24/7 free of charge."

"Free" is a slippery word when it comes to government services. Most of us understand that somebody always pays and start to wonder who pays and how much when a government agency says "free".

So it's a happy coincidence that on the same day, over at the The Indiana Law Blog, Marcia Oddi posted an overview of court fees that was presented to the Commission on Courts. The charts show a complete breakdown of all fees. The 3-page overview for the Commission presents detailed information on several recently added fees, but skips over the (you guessed it) "Automated Record Keeping Fee" of $7, which funds the JTAC projects, Odyssey being the largest. We'll correct that oversight here.

The important fact I learned from this report is how often the fee is collected. For criminal cases, fees aren't assessed if you are not found guilty, and the occasional scofflaw never gets around to paying. Based on the numbers given to the commission, fees are collected on about 56% of all cases. I won't drag you through all of the math. (Click here if you want details.) The bottom line is that since this fee was initiated in 2001, JTAC has collected 48.2 million dollars from the people who file court cases or pay fines in Indiana. Maybe "free" isn't quite the right word. I'd suggest: "Paid for by the citizens of Indiana." The companies who are the primary consumers of this information should know who to thank for this valuable gift.

This concern about the public subsidizing a relatively small number businesses drove Doxpop to decide on a different business model: If you are one of the many for-profit businesses that use court information, we will provide that service for a reasonable fee. If you are a court, we charge you nothing. If you are not a court, but are another government agency or non-profit, we will cut our fees in half, thus supplying the service below our cost. Most importantly, if you don't need our service, you don't pay a dime.

It's not a free lunch, but we believe it is fair, and perhaps more important to the public, honest in its transparency.

Wayne Reload Complete.

We're Done!

Over the Halloween weekend, fueled late at night by sweets filched from the bags of unsuspecting little goblins, our operations team completed the reload of Wayne County's court data.

This morning, the regular data load from Wayne County was restored and everything is now back normal.

Those of you with alerts and schedule notifications set for Wayne County may have received a couple of batches of emails. Some went out very early this morning (before 8AM.) These were "extras" caused be the resynchronization and may be safely ignored. The second batch went out after 8AM. These are new alerts and notifications that stacked up in the queue while we were resynchronizing. Pay attention to these. They are the events that occurred in the last week that you asked us to notify you about.

If you have any questions about any of this, please give the support folks a call. They'll answer your question or transfer you to me.

Thanks again for bearing with us while we did this important work.

Wayne County Resynch Nearly Done

Whew! Almost there. This weekend we completed the resynchronization of Wayne County to take care of a gap created earlier in the month when they had some problems with the server at the courthouse. This turned out to be a time consuming process as we reloaded 17 years worth of court case information for Wayne County.

We will be turning the data feed back on early Monday morning (11/3) to complete the process and return Wayne County to it's normal status.

Those of you who have calendar notification turned on or a number of alerts set for Wayne County cases may receive a slew of email in the morning as we catch up on the week that it took to complete this process. (What? You don't use calendar notification or alerts? Click here and here to learn about what you've been missing!)

Thanks for your patience while we worked through this reload.

Wayne County Resynchronizing... Still underway.

The weekend has passed and we're still working on resynchronizing Wayne County's Court data. The server on the County side of this process was not able to export all of the data over the weekend, so it is taking longer than expected. 1990 through 2003 have been loaded, so we're roughly 75% of the way through.

We will have to keep the regular update process off for Wayne County Courts until this process is completed in order to maintain the integrity of the data. Thanks for bearing with us while the lengthy process completes! As always, calls are welcome if you need more details.

Resynchronizing Wayne County Courts this weekend.

This weekend we are resynchronizing our database of court information with Wayne County to pick up some missing entries from 10/13 and 10/14. We had planned to do this during the last week, but because Wayne County has 18 years worth of history to reload, we have not been able to process it all during weekday evenings. Therefore, we're punting this task to the weekend.

This will mean a brief period over the weekend where Wayne County Data is not available. Look for another post to notify you when this occurs and a final message when the work is completed.

Updates are currently running for Wayne county, so all entries made from 10/15 forward are on the system and the only problem is a gap on the affected days. (No other counties are affected by this issue.)