Oklahoma Was One of the First, If Not the First, States to Have a Comprehensive Online Docket Sheets
Video Transcribed: How Do You Look Up Family Law Cases in Oklahoma? I’m Tulsa family attorney James Wirth, and I’m answering frequently asked questions. So that’s the question that came in is how do you look up Oklahoma court records related to Oklahoma family law matters?
Well, in Oklahoma, it’s actually not too difficult. And Oklahoma was one of the first, if not the first, states to have a comprehensive online docket sheets. So if you’re looking for your case, historically, we’ve had a bifurcated method. We’ve had two different databases for those.
We’ve had OSCN.net, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network, that handled the bigger counties, Tulsa County, Oklahoma County, some of the other counties, but maybe 10, 15, 20 of the counties.
And then the remainder of the counties, the smaller counties, were on ODCR.com. And those are still both active, but OSCN is now more comprehensive and it has those other counties as well.
So you can go to OSCN.net, you can put in some search information for the county, the parties names, the case names, and you can bring up those docket sheets. And for more recent filings, you can actually download those filings.
So in Tulsa, they started scanning and uploading those filings available to be downloaded in November of 2011. Anything from that point forward, should be available online, anything prior to that is not.
For ODCR counties, online filing and downloading goes much further back than that, but you have to have a login and it’s at a paid account there. So for law firms, like our firm, we’ve got a paid account with ODCR.com, so we can log in and download older pleadings.
Not everything though is available online. That’s only for the records that are meant to be public. So adoptions, guardianships, deprived child actions, certain mental health hold actions, those certain actions, those are not public information, it’s not available online.
So you can’t pull that up on the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network. Other things, they may be public, the docket sheet, but some of the information may be sensitive. So certain crimes involving children, they may restrict access to those online. It’s still public record, but you can’t get it online, you have to go down to the courthouse for it.
So the long and the short of it, if it is a smaller county, the native information is probably on ODCR.com. If you have an account or want to have an account, that’s probably the best place to go for that county.
If you don’t have an account or it’s a larger county, go to OSCN.net, you can probably pull off the docket sheet information there, unless it’s a restricted file. And for any new filings, you can download those specific documents there. If you have specific questions regarding a matter though, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney about that. If you want to talk to somebody at my office about your Oklahoma legal case, go to makelaweasy.com.
