Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

Or should I say I was searching for a needle in a haystack? Alright, enough of the farming analogies by a mostly life long suburbanite…

My challenge of a few days ago was locating a copy of a court order within the Cook County Circuit Clerk’s office, on an expedited basis. Generally, every copy of every order entered in a case is part of our hard and soft client files. This is an area where you do still need some paper copies since you’ll generally have your client’s case file with you in court. But, in this particular case what I recall had happened was I had had to rush out of court on a certain day and could not wait for the judge/clerk to have this order entered and the opposing lawyer never forwarded a copy of the particular order to me.

Fast forward to earlier this week…I’m preparing for a substantive argument on a motion to dismiss for which I NEEDED a copy of this old order that I had never gotten a copy of. I do know that the Cook County Circuit Clerk’s Office does at least now scan all orders and saves them on microfilm so I thought I could quickly grab a copy of the order in room 802 before my case…and I could, it just took a while.

Why?

Back to the chickens and the hay…

Briggs a
Because when you look-up your case online (or within the Clerk’s own DOS based system) all that each case lists is a very, very rudimentary outline of the case that helps with dates but makes it very difficult to see exactly what happened or what was ordered on a particular date. I knew a rough 2-3 month date range for when the order I needed was entered so I could narrow it down quite a but it was still a 30+ minute process that could have been 5 minutes if all the orders were readily available on the Internet.