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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Ind. Courts - Part I: Has the state-wide case tracking "wheel" already been invented in Indiana?

If you are a lawyer in one of these twenty Indiana counties -- Bartholomew, Brown, Clinton, Daviess, Delaware, Elkhart, Howard, Jay, Johnson, Marshall, Miami, Monroe, Montgomery, Putnam, Randolph, Spencer, Sullivan, Sullivan, Vigo, Wabash, and Wayne -- you probably already are aware that for $39/month you can have online access to not only current case tracking information from your county's courts, but to the same information in the other nineteen listed counties. In other words, all these counties' courts are computerized and linked.

This service is provided by an Indiana business, Doxpop, LLC. According to its literature, Doxpop provides access to over 3,111,733 current and historical cases from 86 Indiana courts in the Doxpop Network (i.e. the 20 counties). During the average working day a new case is added every twenty seconds.

I started looking into this after I read the Indianapolis Star story on Tuesday headlined "Plan to link 400 courts hits a wall: Costly software glitch halts effort to computerize records statewide" and posted this ILB entry.

I recalled that blogger E. Thomas Kemp, a Richmond attorney, had written only a day or so earlier that:

Independent companies, like Doxpop (which has provided online access to 20 of Indiana's 92 counties to date), have been able to move much more quickly, and have provided an effective system that is responsive to its users without costing the taxpayers a dime.
That got me interested. As it turns out, Kemp does some legal work for Doxpop and is also a user of the service, so he knows whereof he speaks.

On the other hand, I am not a litigator, have no need for the kind of case tracking and scheduling data a litigator requires, and have been only generally aware that the Supreme Court has been undertaking an effort to "computerize the courts" for some time. In other words, a perfect person to dig into this a little further.

Here are some of the things I have found out. Ninety of Indiana's ninety-two have counties currently have computerized case-management systems (CMS). A number of different vendors provide these services to various of the counties, including CSI Computer System, Inc., providers of judicial tracking software, and Maximus, court and justice solutions. Doxpop works on top of a county's case management system. I'm told by Doxpop: "We are a completely independent company that will work with any CMS vendor and in doing so will strictly protect the trade secrets of any CMS vendor we work with." [As corrected on 3/11/05]

What Doxpop does, in the most basic terms, is at 10-minute intervals take the information from these court-based case tracking systems and make it accessible, via protected internet access, to its registered users, whereever they may be. Pretty simple. In addition, this data is finessed so that the lawyer can access items such as his calendar with all scheduled appearances, continuously updated. (See this CSI/Doxpop Court Fact Sheet and this page of "Testimonials".)

As explained in the company's literature:

For Doxpop subscribers, the benefits are access to information 24-hours/day, every day and timely notification of hearings and other important events. In addition to simply looking up information, Doxpop subscribers may opt to receive notification of hearings or other events via E-Mail, thus improving their ability to respond in a timely fashion to filings, service notices, or other actions of the court.
As for the problem of keeping tabs on court fines and costs mentioned in this ILB yesterday, the existing case-tracking systems that Doxpop builds upon have already adapted themselves to the accounting system used in Indiana counties, so this is not a problem, according to the people I spoke with at Doxpop, Ray Ontko, President, and Nick Fankhauser.

The more I learned yesterday, the more I got the feeling that the wheel already has been invented. [More coming in Part II]

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 10, 2005 03:21 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts