Courts

What it does:

Allows you to add all the judicial officers and/or court dockets to the system. It is also used to determine the case numbers (cause number, docket number)

Courts are used for the Assigned/Home Court in the Case Detail screen, and they are used to schedule Events. You can have specific judicial officers or courtrooms, but they should all point back to an official court. As judicial officers come and go, we want to be able to inactivate their name and add a new judicial officer’s court, but tie it all back to that official court.

In Indiana if there are multiple Judges in Superior Court for example, the first judge will be D01, second judge D02, etc. That is the official court. For example, D01 would be Superior Court 1. Then whatever the name of the current judge who is D01 would be added with their official court being D01. If that judge leaves, we simply inactivate their court and add the new one.

The official court is what the order book looks at.

If you have a judge and several magistrates they each get their own court, but they all point to their official court. All their orders will go into that one official court. When you add the assigned/home court to a case, you should select the official court if that is driving your case numbers.

In this county we don’t want the case number to be 92JHB-, we want it to be 92JC1-.

Adding the table entry

Menu | Tables | Courts

  • Code – Choose a code. It can be 1-4 characters.
  • Short description – The short description can be up to 15 characters
  • Long description – The long description is what the users see, it can be up to 50 characters long.
  • Official Court – Assign the judicial officer to their official court. Some counties have multiple Judges. Some counties have Magistrates that report to specific Judges. This ties those courts all together. It is also used for the Assigned/Home Court in the Case Detail screen.
  • Location – You can assign judicial officers to specific courtrooms or locations. See COURTLOCATION for configuration information.
  • Staffing – You can type in the normal staff that accompany this judicial officer, such as Clerk or Reporter, Bailiff, etc. This can be changed as needed from the docket.

Click the Update button to save your work.

The short and long descriptions print when you use the FF hearing codes in templates.

Court Schedules

The scheduling allows you to say how many minutes are available to be scheduled each day.

  • If you set the default length on the events as 1 minute each, then you are counting cases.
  • If you set the default length on the events to actual minutes such as 30 for an Adjudicatory hearing, then you are counting actual minutes.

The simple format is to use the basic schedule to say how many cases can be scheduled on each day.

To schedule more than this, a person needs the update authority to “Events database file – overload hearings”

To set up a more robust court schedule you can Add a Court Schedule. You must set up the ScheduleType tables before you can add a schedule.

Adding the table entry

  • Start Date – This is the day the schedule starts.
  • Days to include in repeat – If this is a normal 4 week rotation, put 28 days, and click Update. It will change the schedule. In this example, since 9/1 is a Thursday you may want to change your start date to 9/5 since it is a Monday.
  • Days to include in repeat – if this is based on the day of the month, for example the first Wednesday of each month we hear Collection cases, then leave the days to include in repeat blank, then we are dealing with days of the month.

Select the type of hearing heard in each day morning and afternoon and the number of minutes (or cases) that can be heard in each session through the month.

You can also set up notes so when they are on the monthly calendar they can see what they should be scheduling.