« Ind. Decisions - "A madman had his day in court yesterday" | Main | Ind. Decisions - Upcoming oral arguments this week »

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Ind. Courts - More on "Vanderburgh court records move to the Web"

On March 16th the ILB quoted from an Evansville Courier & Press story that began:

After years of planning, Vanderburgh County officials have approved a deal that will make court records available to the public on the Internet.

The records should be accessible online by the end of summer.

The deal means people who regularly squeeze into the cramped Room 219 of the Vanderburgh County Courthouse to look up a court record on one of the six public access computers will be able do it from home.

The Richmond, Ind.-based company Doxpop already is providing online records systems for 43 Indiana counties, including Spencer, Warrick, Daviess and Perry.

Saturday the same paper had an editorial about resolving the incompatibility between the private company and the state court project. Some quotes:
Anyone who has ever tracked down their Vanderburgh County court records at the Civic Center knows what a hassle it is. Every day, people queue up at Room 219, waiting their turn at one of six public computer terminals where they can look up basic court records. Customers have to squeeze in past a copy machine, the room is stuffy, the old computer system is slow, and the data available — dates, case numbers and brief summaries — is limited. To see actual court documents, you must go to the Clerk's Office and request the case file, assuming it's not checked out.

Unnecessary trips to the Civic Center could be avoided if basic court records were on the Internet — an idea the county has studied for years. Courier & Press staff writer Kate Braser reported that Vanderburgh County now has struck a deal with Doxpop, a private firm that already posts court records online in 43 other Indiana counties.

Unregistered users of Doxpop can search cases by name and number and get basic information for free — something intended for the occasional user of court records.

Subscription plans of between $25 and $450 monthly are available to registered users doing detailed legal research, such as attorneys, paralegals or other professionals.

This comes as Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard recently unveiled a separate project, through the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee, or JTAC, to link Indiana courts electronically and post their case records online. It relies on a different system, Odyssey, from a different vendor, Tyler Technologies.

Monroe County courts and one court in Marion County are JTAC's pilot-project sites and went "live" in December.

Plans call for expanding it to eight more counties by next year, and Shepard has proposed linking all Indiana courts by 2015.

The problem is, JTAC and Doxpop have not reached accord on how the private firm would be able to interface with the state's new Odyssey system. That means, for the time being anyway, the two systems are incompatible and users could not access Odyssey's court records through Doxpop.

Sound familiar? Yes, the ILB has written about this a number of times before.

Most Indiana counties have some sort of computerized case management system (CMS) to track records and cases before their courts. This information is public but generally requires, as has been the case in Vanderburgh County, going the courthouse, where either you must make your inquiry through the clerk or, if you are fortunate, there are some computer terminals available to the public in the courthouse.

What Doxpop has done is enter into agreements with a number of counties to link into their local systems and publish the court case information online. As I understand it, the remote access service is free or discounted to the governmental officials, and available to others for a fee. Subscribers may not only access their own county's records, but all the other counties that have agreements with Doxpop. - currently a network of over 40 Indiana counties.

The Indiana Court, through its JTAC Committee, a few years ago began a project to link or network all of Indiana's courts. But rather than build on top of the counties' existing, and varied, case management systems, JTAC decided to replace the county systems, one by one, with its own CMS system. The JTAC project will also link up the systems and publish the information online. The JTAC project, which began in 2003, has moved very slowly. Currently the first pilot projects, Monroe County, and Washington Twp. of Marion County, are in process.

The impasse described in the editorial came about when JTAC replaced the Monroe County case management system with its own CMS and did not authorize Doxpop to transfer its interface to the new CMS. This cut off Doxpop's flow of new information from Monroe County effective Dec. 17, 2007. Effective February 15, 2008, all historical case information was removed from Doxpop.

On Dec. 5, 2007, the Supreme Court adopted an Order titled "In Re the matter of public access to electronic court records under Odyssey case management system." The concluding paragraph:

Commercial vendors seeking access to the data in the Odyssey case management system should direct inquiries to the Division of State Court Administration pursuant to the requirements of the Court's Administrative Rule 9(F).
But, as the Evansville editorial makes clear, an accord has not been reached. The editorial continues:
As described by Lilia Judson, executive director of the Division of State Court Administration, it's not a technical issue so much as a policy question: Should a private firm be able to earn a profit off public records that the state itself seeks to make available online for free? (The state project is paid for through court fees and federal grants.)

Another issue is competition: While Doxpop is the dominant player in the Indiana market, other software vendors want to offer the service. * * *

The Indiana Supreme Court ought to resolve this dispute — and soon. The justices must do so in a way that ensures basic court records, at least, will be online for free; that the eventual statewide project will be compatible with systems counties already use so that years of effort won't be wasted; and that all private vendors are dealt with fairly while ensuring public access.

Is this really such a difficult problem? Certain of Monroe County's case information is now available online, free to anyone anywhere who wishes to access it, via the JTAC project,. Presumably this situation would remain the same if private companies were allowed to tap into the new Monroe County CMS.

Re the question posed in the editorial: "Should a private firm be able to earn a profit off public records that the state itself seeks to make available online for free?" Why not? What is the difference between this situation and the Indiana Opinions, which the Court makes available online to the public, but which private companies such as West Publishing and Lexis also access directly from the Court and publish for their own subscribers in a number of enhanced formats? It is the public itself who will decide whether the free version is adequate to its needs, or whether it needs to purchase West's or Lexis' enhancements.

The same should be the case for Doxpop and any other company wishing to access the data stream from the Monroe County case management system.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 30, 2008 05:14 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts