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Nebraska Rolls Out Free Docket App

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Attorneys and judges in Nebraska have been able to use a searchable online court calendar for several years. But since this past fall they’ve had something a lot more slick for finding court dates: an app.

Last September the state of Nebraska authorized and created a free state court docket app for the iPhone and its progeny. Nebraska appears to be the only state, so far, to have created such an app.

The app makes most district and all county court hearing schedules searchable by day, time and location in real time. During its first month, the app was downloaded over 150 times, says Jennifer Rasmussen, project manager at Nebraska.gov, the state portal site that handled the programming.

There haven’t been any comments posted about it on iTunes, but Rasmussen figures the audience could widen considerably, with about 6,500 attorneys in the state—maybe half of them trial lawyers.

“People are pretty surprised when we tell them it’s out there,” says Bill Miller, deputy state court administrator for information technology. A few attorneys or judges had been asking about such a thing, and mostly in jest, he says.

“There were a couple of ‘Hey, how come you guys don’t have an iPhone app?’ ” he recalls with a laugh. “It was not done in seriousness. But now we do.”

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