More on Indiana State Court Computer System Project

Hey folks, as an update to this post, be sure to go back and check the comments.

To understand what is going on here in this public vs. private effort to bring the local court scheduling records together in a state wide computer system, you need to know some of the background: Historically, each county was responsible for maintaining their local court records and providing access to the public. As technology progressed, courts wanted to store scheduling and other court related information on computers for better access.

Each trial court was left to make its own decisions on how to do this. Some small counties, like Union County, kept with the paper systems in place, but most moved to computers. While Fayette County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Pflum wrote his own court scheduling system, most courts turned to a handful of private companies to develop commercial software to handle the task. One of the biggest providers in Indiana turned out to be CSI, Inc., a firm run by Kevin Cook. Kevin’s company has been maintaining sophisticated and effective court scheduling software in local Indiana courts across the state for over 20 years.

Along comes Doxpop, and through a partnership with CSI and other vendors, brings internet access to these records. The important thing about this effort is that it was structured such that internet access was provided to these records at no cost to the counties. All of this has been done on a voluntary basis, albeit, with the express permission of the Indiana State Court Administration.

Several years ago, the State decided that it would construct a computer system for these local court records which would be controlled by the state, and mandated on all the courts across the state. Since this announcement, courts, vendors like CSI and Doxpop have wondered how this new system would impact them, but the state system has been, to say the least, delayed, its been business as usual, save for the fact that no one can plan for the future.

Now the State has announced that it will start a pilot of its central system in Monroe County this month. This means that CSI will be shut out of Monroe and Monroe’s current data will be pulled out of Doxpop.

As Kevin points out, the State is planning to spend real taxpayer dollars on its effort:

The Indiana Supreme Court who plans to spend nearly $100 million taxpayer dollars is offering courts a CMS system that forces a court to transact, store and retrieve court information including confidential juvenile, mental health, adoption, personal information over the internet and this confidential information will be housed under the Indiana Supreme Court’s control and view.

So the plan is, take a system of private companies working in cooperation with local courts to bring case information to the public via the internet at no cost to the public, while leaving the local courts in control of their own data, and scrap it so the State can spend millions, effectively putting private companies out of business, and forcing local courts to give up control of their own records.

Kevin points to a Monroe County blog for additional information Pin-the-Tail.

[Full Disclosure: I have done legal work for Doxpop]

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