This week Doxpop is beginning the process of adding data from the Odyssey case management system that supports 119 courts in 35 counties. This means that, effective immediately, your research on Doxpop will include results covering nearly 20 million cases from 249 courts in 77 Indiana counties.

It starts slow, and gets better every month!

Initially Doxpop is adding monthly snapshots of case data from the new courts. This means the data is primarily useful for subscribers doing background checks and generally seeking historical information about a person or case. Because of the large interval between updates, Doxpop will not initially be providing calendar or notification services for these courts.

The initial snapshot of case data is not as detailed as we'd like, but more detailed information is already in the pipeline for the next monthly update, so expect continuous improvement with each update as we move forward.

Soon after the first of the year, Doxpop plans to have near real-time updates available for the new courts. At that time, we'll be able to provide all of the timely notification services, calendars, and current information that you are used to with the current Doxpop courts.

During the next few months it will be very important for Doxpop users to check the "freshness date" on each case detail page and look for the codes indicating how often the data is updated for each case in your search results. To make this easier, we've added this information at the search result level. Please watch our new training video to learn more about how this works.

Which courts are being added?

Take a look at the special sidebar in this newsletter for a list of the courts being added. Complete information on how far back the information goes in each court is available under the "courts" tab on our website.

A few important notes:

You will notice that that there is some overlap in our current court information and the new data. In each case, you should be aware of some special conditions that may result in duplicated case information.

• In Allen County, Doxpop is maintaining our current daily update of Civil cases, and the existing data for these case types will not be removed or changed. Doxpop currently has detailed information for older Probate and Citation cases, and we will be adding more current (but less detailed) cases received from Odyssey to the existing information to provide you with complete coverage. This means that in some situations, you will see two versions of the same case. We are keeping all of this information available in spite of the duplication until we are able to obtain a more detailed version of the current information. While this is happening you should check BOTH versions to ensure that you have all pertinent information.
• In Hamilton and Shelby Counties the level of detail in the new data feed is on par with existing case information, but we believe that some older cases are missing from the new data feed. Until we are able to determine which cases need to be saved from the existing data to provide complete information, we're keeping everything. Like Allen, this will mean that in some situations you will see duplicates.

In general, our approach is to keep everything until we're able to remove duplicates with care. Until then, we trust that our customers would rather see some information twice than miss important information.

How is this all possible?

The addition of these courts is possible because the Indiana Supreme Court recently committed to making monthly snapshots of court information available in bulk from their case management system beginning in October 2011, and committed to making a near real-time data feed available on January 1, 2012.

There is a significant cost to Doxpop for accessing these data feeds, but we believe the added value for our customers makes this a good business decision. We hope you'll agree!