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Monday, November 07, 2011

Ind. Courts - Appellate Clerk announces an entirely new docket by the end of the year

"Long-Awaited Changes to Clerk of Courts Website Are Finally Coming" is the heading to this article by state Court Clerk Kevin Smith in the Court Times. Phase I: Online Annual Registration and Updating of Roll of Attorneys Information, is something we all have encountered this year when registering. But Phase II may be a pleasant surprise:

Phase II will involve a complete overhaul of the Clerk’s Online Docket, which, at long last, is being replaced with an entirely new system. Users will be able to search for case dockets using multiple criteria (such as party name, court on appeal, trial court, appellate cause number, lower cause number, case type, litigant name, attorney name, trial court judge, date restrictions, etc.), and then further narrow and/or sort the results by similar criteria. They also will be able to view a docket from the results list, and then “go back” to their results screen again without having to run the query all over again.

Further, interested persons will now be able to use the Clerk’s Online Docket for research purposes in ways they have never been able to before. For example, if someone wanted to see how many appeals were filed from a particular trial court during 2011, she could simply specify the trial court and a date restriction of 2011, and up will come all appeals opened during 2011 from that trial court. She would then be able to look at the dockets in each case, gleaning relevant information from each and then going “back” to the list to look at the next one.

Other examples could include viewing the dockets in all appeals involving mortgage foreclosures, or in all appeals in which a certain attorney was counsel of record, or in all appeals filed with Court of Appeals during a given week. The possibilities are limitless concerning the information that attorneys, members of the media, and members of the public will now be able to gather easily from the Clerk’s Online Docket. We anticipate Phase II will be completed by the end of calendar year 2011.

ILB: My first question is, how far back does it go? My second question is, what does this portent, if anything, for electronic filing? When will we have a state system at least as accessible as PACER at the federal level (and without the fees)?

Back to the article. Phase III: Automatic Notification of Appellate Docket Activity, begins (but be sure to read it all):

Phase III will provide attorneys and members of the media and public with the unprecedented ability to receive e-mail notifications when certain activity occurs in an appellate case of their choosing. Through a free online subscription service, users will be able to choose the case or cases for which they wish to receive automatic e-mail notifications when certain docket entries (or any docket entry) is made. Subscriptions can be based on any number of criteria, such as: by appellate court (e.g., All, Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, or Tax Court); by appellate cause number; by trial court; by trial court cause number; by county of origin; by specific case type; and by attorney (i.e., cases in which a particular attorney has filed an appearance).

Subscribers will also be able, if they so choose, to further limit the e-mail notifications they receive by information type. For example, if they want to receive e-mail notifications only when orders and/or opinions are issued in all Tax Court cases, then they will be able to so specify. “Order” subscriptions can, in turn, be further narrowed by the specific type of order, such as orders on extensions of time, orders dismissing a case, orders on rehearing petitions, or orders on transfer petitions. Similarly, “opinion” subscriptions can be narrowed so that a person is notified only when a published opinion (or for that matter an unpublished (NFP) opinion) is issued.

All in all, long awaited improvements!

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 7, 2011 03:37 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts