About a month ago, the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County’s website was knocked off-line, apparently as part of an attempted hack, and at this point is still only partly functional. Cook County court forms are not available (as a temporary fix, they have been “replaced” by a link to statewide forms approved by the Illinois Supreme Court – but there are only 22 forms available when before there were many times that) Also, the ability to search cases has been down. After a couple of weeks, the Clerk put up a page to look up traffic cases, but it hasn’t worked for me. I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, but these are the most common things that I look for on the site.
If you want to get this information, that means that you have to go to a courthouse – not a great option during a pandemic. And pro se litigants in particular will have difficulty in obtaining the correct court forms. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.
The WGN nightly news team ran a story last night and I was interviewed as part of it. The story can currently be found here: https://wgntv.com/news/wgn-investigates/cook-county-court-clerk-eyes-return-of-online-docket-after-month-long-outage/?fbclid=IwAR0SrcgZjTxE3ZR1ZWjDsN6ZE9a0RZdbN2RJOl0zkavD9radY6aOdlqBNYA
Thanks to reporters Sam Charles and Ben Bradley for contacting me.
Update: within 24 hours of this report airing, the Cook County Clerk has restored the case search function. It can be found here: https://www.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org/CourtCaseSearch/
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