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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Ind. Courts - Access many Indiana court daily calendars online, at no charge [Updated]

Nick Fankhauser of DoxPop has written to announce that:

Beginning on July 10th, court calendars (dockets) for a day or week will be available for all of our partner courts on the Doxpop web site.

This service is provided at no charge to any person who visits our web site. * * * We provided this feature in response to several judges who asked that both they and the public be allowed to view their court's schedule on the web.

Nick notes that "With the recent addition of Hamilton County, we're up to about 40 counties and 125 courts on-line."

In response to a request for more detail, he responded:

On the right side of the page is a list of the courts we work with, grouped by county or city (in the case of municipal jurisdiction.) Clicking on the link next to each jurisdiction leads to the page where links to the calendar for each court may be found. We're planning to add links to the local rules of court and contact information to these pages as well in an effort to add a bit to the public service side of our offering. You may recall that we offer limited services to the general public at no cost and fund this by charging attorneys and other professionals for access to enhanced services designed to reduce their cost of doing business.

We recently reworded our contracts with most of the courts we work with to allow free access to our database for Prosecutors, Public Defenders and Law Enforcement in the same jurisdiction (sheriff for county courts, city police for municipal.) We already provided free service to courts, clerks, probation, community corrections and CASA/GAL volunteers and staff statewide, so this also expands the public service side a bit further. In addition to the obvious administrative and investigative uses, we hope the law enforcement folks will take advantage of their access to an existing protective order database of significant breadth.

Note that as of today, our site lists 116 courts in 39 counties. We added Hamilton last Monday and have not yet updated the list. Hamilton will add 7 county courts and 2 municipal courts. ( I'm not sure if we'll end up counting the municipal courts yet- that is one reason I haven't updated the count yet- I need to chat with the clerk about how complete the municipal records are.) The counts and list should be updated by the 10th, but you might want to check in that morning to see whether we are claiming 125 or 123 courts.

In addition to Hamilton, we've got LaPorte, Vermillion, Owen, Ripley, Shelby, Dubois and Bluffton (Municipal) in the pipeline for this summer, which expands the network by another 6 counties and 15 courts in the next couple of months. There are about 10 more counties, including two very large ones that have made commitments but are far enough out in the process that I'm not claiming them yet. Presumably we will add them in the fall.

Take a look at the Court page of the DoxPop site here. I checked out Johnson County via the right column and found calendars for today and this week. Hancock County is listed, but apparently has elected not to make its calendars available, so you will still need to call them for information. Hamilton County, according to Nick's information, will be added to the list shortly.

[Updated 1:30 pm] Hancock and Hamilton court calendars are both now available.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 10, 2007 08:27 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts