San Bernardino Superior Court’s tech team gave an overview of the court’s new court access portal April 26.
The court was awarded a grant to build the portal in January, 2021, and went live with it in February, 2022.
The old court access portal is still live, and people may choose between either.
The new portal was made by the court, to replace the Tyler Odyssey portal in use since February, 2016. The Tyler portal was “plagued with performance and stability issues,” causing the court to develop its own version, said Micah May, San Bernardino Superior Court chief information officer. May presented the training with IT Supervisor Rich Coles.
Current features
- The new portal allows for users, attorneys or not, to register. Registered users keep track of their purchased documents and important cases
- Documents
- A user may buy documents from the new portal
- A user has to click on the preview icon for a document, then add the document to their cart through the button at the top of the preview, to purchase the document
- Bought documents are kept linked to the user’s account. Users can view all of their purchased documents at a single page linked on the dashboard, and can filter those documents by case number
- A user can purchase multiple documents at once, and receive a single receipt, while the old system required individual purchases of each document
- Document receipts are emailed, for reconciliation with an attorney’s firm, and are also kept on a special page linked to the user’s account
- Attorneys can get elevated access to cases they are the attorney of record for
- To register for the elevated access, an attorney needs to register in a special page linked to on the dashboard
- Users can favorite certain cases to keep in a designated tab
- Searches by party and business names require registration and search credit payment, in accordance with new state rules
- One search credit costs $1, five cost $3.50, 10 cost $5 and 100 cost $40
- Calendar
- The portal’s calendar search allows users to filter by case category and department
- The portal’s calendar search automatically filters out departments which have no hearings of the type selected on the given date
- The portal’s calendar loads faster than the previous portal loads
- Case summaries print better than in the old portal
Future changes
- The team will begin optimizing for mobile devices
- The team will work on developing better captchas for mobile devices
- The team is working to give enhanced attorney access to attorneys who are not listed as attorneys of record, but are the appointed guardian ad litem
- The team will work to give attorney access to the law firms each attorney works for, instead of only to the attorney
- The team will work to provide more access to self-represented litigants
- More issues can be directed to courts-capfeedback@sb-court.org, with the name, account, case#, screenshot of the issue, and a description of the issue
