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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Ind. Courts - "Shelby County court records available via online firm"

From a long report by Bettina Puckett, staff writer for the Shelbyville News:

The computer age has roared into Shelby County in the form of more than 136,000 Shelby County court records that now can be easily accessed and viewed on the Internet via a company called Doxpop.

The recent addition of Shelby County increases the coverage of the Doxpop Court Record Database to half of Indiana's 92 counties, said Raymond Ontko, president of the Richmond-based public records access company.

Shelby County Clerk Carol Stohry worked in cooperation with Doxpop to make the records of the county's three courts - Circuit, Superior I and Superior II - available online 24 hours a day. Shelby County court records on the Doxpop system date back to July 1995.

The Doxpop network provides online access to judicial case-tracking information without visiting or placing a call to the courthouse, Ontko said. Out-of-town attorneys are a good example of people who normally would make a lot of calls to the clerk's office or ask that office to do a lot of faxing, he said. * * *

When Stohry pitched the Doxpop idea to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners back in February, she emphasized that it would not cost the county's taxpayers a dime. Doxpop makes its money by charging customers subscription fees for the online service.

"Development and installation of the Doxpop interface to Shelby County court records have cost Shelby County nothing, and all related expenses have been assumed by Doxpop," Ontko said. In addition, the ongoing operation of the system is supported entirely by voluntary subscription users of the Doxpop system, so taxpayer money is never required for its operation, he said. * * *

Monthly fees range from $25 for individuals tracking a single case or looking for a small number of documents to $450 for organizations having 20 or more users. The company gives complimentary subscriptions to some county offices, including sheriff's departments.

All data transmitted to Doxpop is held in a secure database, completely isolated from the courts' and recorders' own systems. * * *

Doxpop permits subscription users to see the full case details of open/pending and closed/disposed cases dating back to 1995. The chronological case summary, or docket sheet, is the heart of this information. Users may also see the schedule of upcoming hearings in a case, and any attorney can view a personal court calendar showing events in all Doxpop courts.

The Doxpop system enables searching by name, by case number and by any combination of known bits of data about a case party. Advanced features include automatic e-mail notification of any changes on cases of interest. E-mail notice of calendar changes is also easy to set up on the Doxpop system, the company's press release said.

"Doxpop is rapidly becoming a de facto state-wide system for public and professional access to important public information," Ontko said. "We continue to work with all case management system providers to produce a truly statewide system."

Shelby County is the 46th Indiana county to become a part of the Doxpop network. An additional five Indiana county court systems are expected to join the network by the end of 2008.

And, as you can see via the right-hand column of the ILB, Doxpop has been an ILB supporter since April of this year .

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 30, 2008 03:17 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts