Philadelphia City Hall. Photo: Shutterstock

A week after the First Judicial District's online docket search function stopped working, the site is back up and running.

The week without a searchable online docket marked the second significant disruption of the court's electronic services this summer—the first time being a disruption that lasted six weeks and affected both the external access to dockets and the court's internal filing system.

The recent weeklong disruption affected only the online search function for the Common Pleas Civil and Orphans' Court dockets. According to Gabriel Roberts, a spokesman for the FJD, the services had been temporarily suspended due to "application maintenance." Roberts noted at the time that the court is continuing to address tech issues as they arise.

"While the public-facing applications that we have are largely functional at this point, we are always making improvements to the system, especially following the events in May," he told The Legal last week.

Attorneys had reported to The Legal last week that, in the days before the court officially suspended the online search tool, they had been experiencing frequent outages.

On Wednesday, after the site was restored, Roberts declined to comment about whether the site coming back online signaled the end of the lingering problems, but said it was "a positive sign."

Along with problems accessing the online docket, attorneys who spoke with The Legal primarily reported periodic trouble filing dockets online and opening hyperlinked documents sent to them by the court system.

"For the most part the court's filing system works pretty well. There are sporadic periods where [a given filing] can't be found on the server," Nancy Winkler of Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck said last week.

The problems had continued to pester attorneys in the wake of the much larger shutdown the court experienced earlier in the summer.

In late May, the court's website was initially shut down to "safeguard" its systems after the FJD experienced what a city spokesman said was a "virus intrusion on a limited number of computers."

The shutdown, however, left the First Judicial District's website, online civil docket search and the e-filing system for civil and criminal cases inaccessible for six weeks. Public access to court filings through the city's public computers for criminal records, filings, motions and appeals were also down.

The court has been circumspect about the intrusion that occurred.

During the weeks officials worked to get the court's online systems back online, attorneys resorted to using couriers to file papers, and turned to the honor system when it came to notifying parties that motions had been filed. Several law firms also began imposing internal deadlines that required lawyers to draft filings far in advance of the court-mandated filing deadlines in case couriers experienced traffic or long lines at the court.