COA Website Docket Sheet is a Blessing and a Curse

Don’t get me wrong. I love the COA website (even the newly minted website to which I am still adjusting). In fact, I look at the docket sheet on the COA website, conservatively, 25 times per day. I turn it to verify that I have my dates correct on the procedural history of my cases, to find out if something new has happened, to look up counsel information, look up opinions and panels on my old cases, and so on. In short, the docket sheet is invaluable to my practice. That’s a blessing. I suppose the curse is not really a curse, but if a client either learns about the COA website or checks on it, they are sometimes confused about what an entry means. This usually prompts a question to me about why the docket says such and such, but in reality, it is a simple ministerial matter that I completely understood, but meant something else to the lay person reviewing the docket sheet. I have mixed feelings about telling my clients about the online docket sheet.

If they do know about it, it might generate a lot of unnecessary questions, and I like to control how I tell my clients about events (such as when an opinion comes out). But at the same time, a client who knows about the COA docket sheet may be able to save their case if they have an attorney who is not doing her job. For instance, the client could learn that a transcript is overdue, or that the case has been dismissed for failure to cure a defect. Of course, that does not happen in my cases, but I have seen it happen to other clients, who only learned of a problem well after the time it could have been corrected. I think the Court of Appeals has learned in the past couple of weeks how much attorneys utilize their website, especially the docket sheet, now that they have upgraded and modified the website!