Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

NEW! Improved Super Search now allows Wildcard Searching!

Many of you have enjoyed our Super Search feature, which allows the search terms you enter, along with any relevant similar terms, to appear anywhere in the name, case title, or party string. This has been a really helpful feature in searching court information where E-Filing has introduced more uncertainty in name indexes. The next step to improving our Super Search is to allow a wildcard to end any word.


If you customarily search using last name, first initial (or partial first name) then this feature is for you!


You may now use this approach with the super search. For example, if we're searching the name "Connie Smith-Jones" we can start with the search string: "Smith Jones, Con%"

Searching for "Smith Jones, Con%" brings back 4 results without the Super Search

You can see there are 4 case results, and we've accounted for the hyphenated name by adding some technology that ignores punctuation and other formatting characters. We also see that "Connie" has been spelled differently, and each case has a slightly different name. This has been a fruitful search! Previously, if your search requirements included the use of wildcards, this is as far as you might search. With this improvement, you may now run this same search through Doxpop's Super Search:

Super Search with Wildcards

Here, we have not changed the search string at all, but have added the Super Search by clicking the checkbox. You can see that there are now 6 case results. The super search is breaking our search down into words that be located anywhere in the case party field, as well as allowing any of those words to be open-ended. So not only are we able to see the various spellings of "Connie," we are also able to tackle situations where the names have been entered in a different order or combination.


Searching for "Smith Jones, Con%" brings back 6 results with the Super Search

Please give this improvement a try and let us know how it works. This feature is now available for searching Court Cases, and will be added to our Tax Warrant and Recorded Document search tools very soon. Super Search with Wildcards is a winning combination!

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

File size limits increased for E-Filers


The size limits for documents and envelopes submitted to trial courts has been increased to 75MB per envelope, with no single document withing the envelope exceeding 50MB.

This change means the size limits are now consistent for all Indiana Courts. (Trial Courts and Appellate Courts.)

Monday, December 23, 2019

Doxpop's 2019 Holiday Closures



Happy Holidays from all of us at Doxpop!

In order to allow our teams to spend this time with family and loved ones our office will be closed during the following days:

Tuesday, December 24th
Wednesday, December 25th
Wednesday, January 1st

During this time our support department will be closed but we do understand that sometimes you have to deal with an emergency situation during a holiday. 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 these times we are closed. If you have an 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 emergency situations that can't wait until after the holiday.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

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.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

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. 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

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.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

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


Friday, October 25, 2019

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.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

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. 



Tuesday, October 15, 2019

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.