Changes coming to online dockets?

Appellate practitioners in California are heavy users of the web-based California Courts Appellate Courts Case Information system to find and follow appellate dockets. Well, apparently, the system is (and probably always has been) under constant cyber-"attack" (of sorts) by web-bots and data scrapers. This puts a strain on the system, and the Judicial Council is exploring ways of fighting back. In particular, one change likely to be approved soon will affect something that most appellate lawyers probably do: bookmarking dockets for easy and direct access. (For example, suppose I want to follow appeal number B284432. Rather than access the main page and input the 2d DCA and then case number every time I want to check that docket, instead I can just create a bookmark to go directly to that docket, like this.) The anticipated change will disable all existing bookmarks. Fortunately, bookmarking will still be allowed, but it will need to be re-done after some tweaks in the system behind the scenes. And the new bookmarks are likely to be set up to expire in a year (after which they would need to be renewed). With any luck, this will be only a slight administrative hassle to users and a big help in protecting the system.

How annoying is the problem of robot hacking? Well, this week's stats for this blog as of right now show 1358 hits from Ireland, 250 from Italy, 42 from France, 32 Germany, 23 Ukraine, 14 China, 11 Spain, 10 Brazil, and 8 Portugal. Are those all California appellate lawyers on vacation? Sadly, not too likely. Instead, these are almost certainly foreign bots searching SCAN for ... something (credit card numbers? Social Security numbers?). Who knows. But I really doubt that over a thousand Irishmen (and women) are really interested in following SoCal appellate news....