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| Courtlink | Legal
Research Online Legal Services |
 The
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system provides access to Federal
District and Bankruptcy Court case information and dockets through a dialup connection.
Since I was less than satisfied with that system, I liked the sounds of what CourtLink
advertised it could do. CourtLink provides acc-ess to PACER and other online court systems through a single Windows interface. Instead of using a communication package like ProComm to connect to each court in a bulletin board fashion--and having to know each phone number and connect separately to each court--CourtLink lets you to select which court or courts you want to check for information, set up your search by party name or docket number, and then display or print the results. In addition to its link to PACER, CourtLink also provides access to the Oregon State Appellate, Tax, Circuit and District Courts, and Washington State Superior, District and Municipal Courts. They are currently adding Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal, California and Texas state courts. Data West plans to add approximately 10 additional eastern states in the coming year. CourtLink is available as a download from their Web site or on disks by mail. I chose to use the disks. The installation went smoothly and used just 5 MB of hard disk space. In a matter of a minutes, I was ready to log on. My first attempt was unsuccessful, however, since the default local telephone number that came with the software was no longer in service. My next attempt, using the 800 number provided, did work, and a message displayed informing me of any courts that were unavailable. I typed in my ID and password, and was prompted to type in a client ID (or select one from a drop-down box) for charge-back purposes. I selected the Federal District Court search template, designed a search for a company in Minnesota and clicked on Search. In all, it took approximately five minutes to conduct the search, a bit long for my needs. As entries were retrieved, they were added to a display that included litigant name, case number, date, description, location and court ID. After the search was completed, I was able to sort on any of these display items and print the results in a nice, landscape-formatted report. I then selected one of the items from the results list and waited, again, for the information to display. At this point, I could move between tabbed windows that provided summary, names and docket information. Other features that add functionality to the software include the Profile Manager and the ability to queue searches. The Profile Manager lets you create profiles of multiple courts that you may want to search simultaneously. Profiles for the eleven federal circuits come installed with the software. The Search Queue lets you set up one or more searches that can be run one after the other when you are ready to proceed. I like the idea of what CourtLink does, and I understand the complexities of what the system has to do to bring all the data from the different courts together in one place. But overall, I found CourtLink frustrating to use because of the time it took to perform a search and display the results. There are a lot of good reasons to use it, however, and I would recommend it to individuals who do not feel comfortable using communication software and have to access multiple courts. If you are going to use it, be sure to go through the tutorial. If you have experience using PACER and are proficient with setting up communication sessions, you may want to continue with what you are using until CourtLink reduces the time it takes to perform searches. |
Data West Corporation (800) 774-7317 www.courtlink.com Windows 3.1, 95, NT Single
Workstation: $49 Reviewed by Nina Platt, Librarian, Minnesota Office of the Attorney General, St. Paul, Minn. |
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