What we changed - PROXYsearch/PROXYsearch.github.io GitHub Wiki

Overall, we combined the segmented search forms from the SC Judicial Department into a single proxy search form. But we also made a few alterations along the way to increase user friendliness.

• Combined courts as default option - When searching by court on the SC site, the default option is "Supreme Court," and the other options ("Court of Appeals" and "Supreme Court and Court of Appeals") are hidden within a dropdown menu. This is not intuitive for most users, who expect to search all available data by default. So we changed the order of these options so that "combined courts" is the default option, and the dropdown allows you to limit the search to "Supreme Court only" or "Court of Appeals only."

• Clarified query by judge options - Search #3 and Search #4 on the SC site are somewhat unclear as to what it means to search by judge under each dropdown, if you're not already familiar with how the state court system is structured. It appears that you can search for more than one trial judge at a time, though in fact you can't. In our search form, we clarified that Circuit Court, Family Court, and Master in Equity are all separate examples of lower court judges, and you have to pick only one.