MONTGOMERY COUNTY CLERK OF COURTS
PUBLIC RECORD POLICY

GREGORY A. BRUSH, MONTGOMERY COUNTY CLERK OF COURTS

The Montgomery County Clerk of Courts is the keeper of the record for all legal documents filed in the Montgomery County Courts, Area One, and Area Two.

Court documents are public records. Records for all civil, criminal, and traffic cases are available in their entirety for public viewing during normal County Courts operating hours. Those hours are posted on this website.

Debate about privacy issues has increased in recent years because technology has enabled this office and other government offices to display public information via the internet.

The County Courts developed the PRO (Public Records Online) System, an internet-based product that documents the major events in the life of a case through an online viewable docket, much like one would see if they looked at one of the old handwritten docket books that the Courts utilized prior to our computerized case management system.

The PRO System was designed for our primary customer base; the legal community, Judges, lawyers, probation officers, paralegals, title company officials, court staff, and legal administrators are able to utilize PRO to view documents and follow case activity at the touch of a button. Prior to the PRO System, each interested party would have to come into the Courts, request a copy of the file, pay for copying charges if they wanted a copy, and return that file to our staff.

Besides the legal community, PRO has delivered value for other customers as well. For example, neighborhood groups have indicated that they use the PRO System to find out information that falls into the foreclosure process. These groups can also follow the progress of criminal cases involving issues of public safety that impact where they live. This is an example of how we are opening up the doors of the courthouse in a different, but meaningful way through our Public Records Online (PRO) System.

How do we balance privacy issues with what we believe is a meaningful information source for the citizens of this community? This balance is exactly what makes discussions about privacy issues difficult, because there are different opinions about where that proper balance lies. There are 88 county clerks of court in Ohio, and it is conceivable that there could be 88 different opinions about privacy issues with regards to placing court records on the internet.

These are our practices regarding public records and the PRO System:

  1. Court records are public records, unless a court determines otherwise.
  2. There is some information that we have chosen not to publish on the PRO site. It is not in the public interest for certain information to reside on an internet site for mass public viewing. Remember, every document is available for public view at the Courts.
  3. Although our records and databases contain Social Security numbers, we will not show them on the public internet site due to privacy and Identity Theft concerns.
  4. We suppress all information on the PRO System regarding Civil Stalking or Sexually Oriented Offense Protection Orders and Domestic Violence Protection Orders, where that information would be likely to publicly reveal the identity or location of the party protected under such an order. This is pursuant to 18 U.S.C.S. ยง 2265. No information will be made available to the general public and attorneys, including case caption and the online docket of events.

We have tried to be thoughtful about how we display information on the internet, and we believe we have found the right balance.

Revised August 3, 2007.