Indiana courts must maintain certain records. The clerk of the court is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the chronological case summary (CCS) under Trial Rule 77(B). The clerk must maintain a sequential record of the judicial events in every proceeding. The record includes the caption of the case, case number, and the names, addresses, telephone numbers of attorneys and self-represented individuals.
The clerk also records the assessment of fees and charges. The clerk must record the date of each judicial event and briefly define any documents, orders, rulings, or judgments filed or entered in the case. The clerk must also make an entry if and when notice of judgments and orders has been sent to the parties. The CCS must also be a record of the date of the entry of orders, rulings and judgments in the record of judgments and orders (RJO), the entry of judgments in the judgment docket, and whether the case file is pending or decided.
The CCS is the official record of the trial court and must be maintained apart from other records of the court and be organized by case number. Years of local customs and practices, often driven by local personalities and circumstances, has resulted in these required recordkeeping functions being performed by different offices, depending on the time and place. It is important to keep in mind that both the judge and clerk have responsibility for court records under Administrative Rule 10 which states, among other things, that:
(A) Court Responsiblities. Each judge is administratively responsible for the integrity of the judicial records of the court and must ensure that measures and procedures are employed to protect such records from mutilation, false entry, theft, alienation, and any unauthorized alteration, addition, deletion, or replacement of items or data elements.
(B) Clerk Responsibilities. Each Clerk is responsible for the maintenance of court records in a manner consistent with the directives of the Supreme Court of Indiana, judge of court, and other pertinent authority. …
Because the chronological case summary is one of the court’s most basic management tools, the guiding principles that determine how the CCS is written and maintained are important. Four of these principles are particularly important.
The first guiding principle for writing the CCS is that entries should be brief. Frequently, the CCS is written with too much detail and description rather than a summary of the court order. Trial Rule 77(B) dictates that the notation of judicial events on the CCS must “briefly define” any documents, orders, rulings, or judgments filed or entered in the case. While a CCS entry should summarize an event accurately, it should not include so much detail that the complete order is described in the entry. An entry on the CCS that reads “Motion granted” would not be descriptive or detailed enough. A more appropriate entry would read: “Motion for summary judgment filed by Plaintiff Smith on May 15, 2010 granted on July 1, 2010.”
Second, the CCS should be accurate and chronological. The CCS is a “sequential record” of events and the chronology of developments in the case is critical. Suppose that the Clerk’s office receives on April 5th a court order that was signed and file-stamped by the trial judge on April 2nd. The CCS should indicate that the entry is made on April 5th for an order that was signed, dated, and file-stamped on April 2nd. Given these facts, the entry should never state that it is being made on the 2nd of April when it was in fact received by the Clerk’s office on the 5th of April. If it did, the chronological sequence of events in the case would not be preserved and the entry would be inaccurate. This requirement becomes crucial under the series of rule amendments recently adopted by the Indiana Supreme Court, effective January 1, 2011, and specifying that notation on the CCS is the key triggering event for the start of the running of time limits, such as the time for appeal. The Clerk must endeavor to make CCS entries of filed documents and orders on the day that they are received so that the entries will always remain accurate and to engender public confidence in the court’s records.
Third, entries on the CCS should never be backdated. In the above example, suppose someone obtained a certified copy of the CCS on April 4th, when that copy showed no activity in the case for several weeks. If the Clerk’s office later backdates a CCS entry of the order to match the file-stamped date of April 2nd, even though it was not received for entry on the CCS until April 5th, the certified copy obtained on April 4th would be inaccurate. The CCS should state that the entry is being made on April 5th for an order that was signed, dated, and file-stamped on April 2nd. The certified copy of the CCS obtained on April 4th has no backdating, and bolsters public confidence in certified copies of records obtained from the court.
Finally, an entry on the CCS may only be amended by a corrective entry and should never itself be corrected or deleted. It is crucial that the record of proceedings in a case is consistent and accurate, particularly when some courts, with the approval of the Division of State Court Administration, are posting their CCS entries on the Internet. The integrity and chronology of events on the CCS would be called into question if it was arbitrarily subject to amendment or deletion.
The CCS is one of the court’s most valuable management tools and an important administrative component of Trial Rule 77. These guiding principles, when observed, can contribute to improving the value of the CCS to both the courts and the general public.