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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Ind. Courts - Update on Supreme Court's case management system plans

"Current Activities and Next Steps" is the heading to this JTAC report posted recently on the Court website. It outlines the counties where the JTAC case management system is planned to be deployed during the next two years: "JTAC will work to make Odyssey available to all courts in the following counties: DeKalb, Allen, Huntington, Hamilton, Madison, Clark, Harrison, Floyd."

Statistics. The report notes:

Thousands Taking Advantage of Free Public Access. Public information on cases logged into Odyssey is available at no charge via the Supreme Court’s website (www.courts.in.gov).

During March 2008, more than 5,500 unique visitors used the website, viewing more than 216,000 pages. The convenience of the web-based access is evident by the number of users viewing documents 24 hours a day. While there were an average of 24,000 page hits between 3-4 p.m., there were also 860 hits between 3-4 a.m.

Perhaps. It is hard to know how to interpret these stats because each counter system is different. Because of that, most blogs (including the ILB) use Sitemeter so that stats are more readily compared.

During March, when the Court reported 5,500 unique visitors, for instance, the ILB had 33,841. On the other hand, during March, when the Court reports 216,000 "page views", the ILB had 54,679. (Here is a link to the ILB's counter [corrected]. There does not appear to be a link to the Court's counter.)

Page view figures are difficult to interpret. What is a "page"? Some counters count "hits" as pages. On the other hand, according to one tracking site:

a page view is each time a visitor views a webpage on your site, irrespective of how many hits are generated. Pages are comprised of files. Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (i.e. a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits.
The ILB's meter counts pages, not hits. It appears possible that the court meter is counting "hits," so that when one does a search and gets a list of filings, rather than counting this as one page, each item on the list is counted individually.

Counties to be Covered. Currently the Court CMS project is covering Monroe County and Washington Twp. in Marion County. DeKalb, Allen, Huntington, Hamilton, Madison, Clark, Harrison, Floyd are listed as to be added in the next two years.

As discussed in this ILB entry from March 30th, JTAC has been unwilling to allow private companies to tap into the new Monroe County CMS. One of these companies, Doxpop, which has a network of 136 courts in 45 Indiana counties, had previously included Monroe County in its network. Since the JTAC CMS system was installed, however, Doxpop has been denied access, as detailed in the March 30th entry. The situation continues to remain unresolved.*

Will this continue to be a problem with the new list of counties? Are there overlaps? I've compared the JTAC list against the list of counties Doxpop currently serves. The counties in boldface in the JTAC list are currently part of Doxpop's network: DeKalb, Allen, Huntington, Hamilton, Madison, Clark, Harrison, Floyd. Interestingly, Allen County (civil cases only) was just announced by Doxpop last week.
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*Instead it is becoming much more onerous for counties to receive approval per Trial Rule 77(k) for public posting of Court Records on-line. The ILB has been told that the paperwork burden the counties and the provider have to submit to the Division of State Court Administration annually has increased substantially. I'm also told that the county courts are being told that "if the courts in your county elect to use the (JTAC) Odyssey case management system, you will not need to go through the renewal process set forth below ...".

Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 11, 2008 12:23 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts