The new King County, WA “JAMS” System and our new Hybrid Report

On Thursday, November 8^th, 2018, we received notice from the King County Superior Court that they would be transitioning from the legacy SCOMIS system by transferring their case data management onto a new system from Journal Technologies called JAMS. This transition was to take place over the weekend, and would be going live on Tuesday, November 13^th.

While we were made aware of King County’s intentions to switch systems for over a year, no timeline for the transition had ever been published by the court; the sudden and short notice of this change came as no small surprise. As well we were informed that – unlike those counties that transitioned to the Odyssey system – there would be no replication of data to SCOMIS at all for Civil or Probate case types. Thus when JAMS went live, our connection to real-time data from King County was summarily cut-off.

Despite this, our team of developers worked non-stop over the following week, and as of this past Friday have integrated the KC JAMS system into our production services. However, there are observable differences and discrepancies between what data SCOMIS provides for active and legacy cases, and what JAMS displays.

Because of these discrepancies, just as we did with the Odyssey courts, CourtTrax has created a comprehensive Hybrid Report for our customers that combines information from both SCOMIS and the new JAMS system to show all the case data, and to clearly identify the source of the case information. Furthermore, the CourtTrax Hybrid Report allows CourtTrax Online users to customize their reports and control what is displayed, printed or saved.

The purpose of the new CourtTrax WA King County Case Detail Report (CDR) is to combine case information from both the SCOMIS and JAMS systems into a single, complete report.

At the top of a CourtTrax Case Detail Report for a King County search, CourtTrax included the “Data Source” line listing both JAMS and SCOMIS, as was done for the Odyssey courts.

Closing JAMS data source will close the JAMS portion of sections with both data sources. This will not close sections with JAMS as the only data source. The section links just below “Data Source” will allow section closing as they have in the past.

Our integration of JAMS into CourtTrax will be an ongoing endeavor as the King County Superior Court itself may make changes or revisions to their output as they receive feedback from the public.

If you would like to be kept in the loop regarding any future notices about changes to WA King County Superior Court, if you have any questions about the differences between SCOMIS and JAMS, or if you would like information on any of our other products or services, contact us at customerservice@courttrax.com or give us a call: 866-643-7084 (Option 2).