An efiling nightmare -- but with a happy ending

I left you yesterday with a tease for a "doozy" of an efiling story.

This particular nightmare scenario came to me courtesy of long-time colleague Orlando Velazquez, an experienced bankruptcy practitioner, who recently set up a solo practice in Warrenville.

Velazquez had a new client, a defendant in a collection case, who came to him just before the deadline for filing a responsive pleading. He had a substantive legal question to kick around, and we did, and I gave him my free advice (worth every penny he paid for it, I must say). (For the benefit of non-lawyers or lawyers in big firms or government settings, this is pretty common among solos. We pick each other's brains; sometimes it helps just to articulate an issue to a colleague. And Orlando has never given me a wrong answer to a bankruptcy question; sadly, however, there have been instances when I didn't immediately know the right questions to ask....)

Anyway, the substantive question addressed, we turned to the problem of efiling into the First Municipal District. He'd signed onto Odyssey, reaching a screen that looked something like this:

He'd entered the case number -- but Odyssey answered "No Record Found."

Well, here on the lower end of the legal food chain, where the clients aren't Fortune 100 general counsels, sometimes clients provide inaccurate information about docket numbers. An experienced attorney like my colleague Orlando would not be discouraged by this. Like the Chuck Yeager-imitating pilots in The Right Stuff, when A doesn't work, one just calmly moves on to try B. In this case, since his client had a fairly distinctive surname, Velazquez figured he'd search by party name. He moved to a screen that looked like this:

The grayed-out Search button turned blue as soon as the first and last names were entered, and Velazquez clicked...

...

...

... and got a "No Record Found."

At this point, even a pilot with the rightest stuff would start glancing at the eject button.

How does one file into a case that Odyssey says doesn't exist?

The Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court's former electronic docket is still operational. I looked up the case using the number Velazquez's client had supplied -- and, sure enough, the case was there. It just wasn't in Odyssey. Not that we could find.

We discussed possible plans of action, but Orlando needed to get to work on the responsive pleading and I had things to do myself.

But I followed up yesterday afternoon. (I'd promised to write this post, after all.)

"Did you get that pleading on file?"

"I got it submitted," Velazquez said.

"How?" I asked. "Did you have to go downtown and ask in person?"

"No," Velazquez replied. "I called Texas."

Odyssey is operated by Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based company.

According to Velazquez, the problem was that he had entered the actual case number on the case number search screen.

That was a mistake.

In Law Division cases one must include the L as part of the case number in order to pull up a case in Odyssey. But in First Municipal ("Civil" in the nomenclature of the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court), one must not include the "M1" as part of the docket number -- one must include the extra "1" but not the "M."

Well, that makes sense.

Not.

But it was an answer, at least, and the case really was there. And Velazquez had a place to submit his filing.

So why didn't the Party Name search bring the case information up?

Well, said Velazquez, the folks in Texas told him that the Clerk of the Circuit Court has disabled the Party Name search. The feature is still there -- still on the screen -- and the search looks like it's running -- but it's been disabled. And it doesn't tell you that.

So we have a happy ending to one efiling nightmare at least -- and a tip about how to avoid this one pitfall.

We're going to need to share like this to get through this transition to the brave new (and scary) world of Cook County efiling.