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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Ind. Courts - Supreme Court agrees to permit bulk distribution of and also remote access to the records of those courts using the Odyssey case management system

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court voted to make Odyssey bulk data available to third party vendors. Attached is the Order that was signed Sept. 13, 2011 by the Chief Justice, with all justices concurring.

If I understand this correctly, it will go a long way to solving a situation where, as the Supreme Court's Odyssey conversion expands to additional counties, it kicks offline long-time third-party information providers such as Doxpop* by not allowing such providers access to the case management data generated by the new Odyssey system.

The problem was first illustrated several years ago in Monroe County, which had for years been served by Doxpop. After the changeover, as noted in this Feb. 12, 2008 ILB entry, subscribers to DoxPop no longer had access to the Monroe County data, because JTAC did not permit outside access to its Odyssey CMS. The only access to Monroe County data became via the Supreme Court site. A Feb. 6, 2008 mailing from Doxpop on its Monroe County status stated:

On October 25, 2007, Doxpop submitted a request to the Division of State Court Administration to obtain access to Monroe County court information from the state's case management system now being used by the courts there. That request is under review by the Indiana Supreme Court, since ours appears to be the first application for information from the state system.

Unfortunately, Monroe County's permission to publish historical case information through Doxpop expires on 2/15, so we will be removing Monroe County court case information from Doxpop on the evening of 2/15. We continue to work with the Division in hopes that we may include public information from the Monroe County courts at the Doxpop website in the future.

Here is some further information, from a Jan. 10, 2010 ILB entry that near the end discusses "Linking up the courts so that they, and the public, can access the various courts' current and historical dockets":
[Doxpop] is a company that functions to network the data from the courts in more than half the counties in Indiana, regardless of whether the courts in question use the CSI CMS, or the CMS of one of the other providers used by various of the counties. Using Doxpop, courts in various counties can "linkup", and the service is also available to private subscribers, including attorneys.

The Odyssey system is networked by JTAC. Feeds from Odyssey courts are not available to private networks. In Monroe County, which became an Odyssey client last year, Doxpop was no longer allowed to link to the county courts' data feeds. The same would be the case, presumably, for any other company that wished to access a county court Odyssey feed.

Hopefully, the Court's order this week will mean that Doxpop and other qualified and vetted private companies can purchase this data in bulk, finesse it, and make it available to both the counties in their network and to private subscribers.

*Although Doxpop is currently one of the ILB's supporters, the ILB has been making these points for years.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 14, 2011 04:24 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts