TAMES Search

I have created a little bookmarklet for searching for Texas cases in the Courts of Appeals and Supreme Court. A bookmarklet, if you're not familiar with that term, is a "smart bookmark" that does some action when you use it. It's actually a little program, so you can do pretty handy things with bookmarklets.

How this Bookmarklet Works

When you select a case number (e.g., 01-02-00345-CV) and click on the bookmarklet, a new window will open with the TAMES case page for the case number in question. In my example, that would be this page. So, for example, you can highlight the case number in Westlaw, then click this bookmarklet, and it will open a new window with the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court page (as appropriate) for the case. This makes it easy to check petition/writ history, motions for rehearing, and the like.

Features

Works with all Court of Appeals and Supreme Court of Texas cases. It doesn't work with the Court of Criminal Appeals, which uses a different website structure than the other courts.
Understands sloppy highlighting. For example, it's okay if you highlight No. 01-02-00345-CV. The No. and trailing . will be ignored.
Understands en-dashes and automatically replaces them with hyphens. So, 01–02–00345–CV becomes 01-02-00345-CV.
Automatically fixes "incomplete" numbers. For example, it automatically converts 1-2-345-CV into 01-02-00345-CV.
If you haven't selected anything or if what you have selected isn't a valid case number, it takes you to the main TAMES search page.

The Bookmarklet

Here is the bookmarklet itself. To use it, simply create a bookmark in your browser and use this as the URL (address):

javascript:function TAMESSearch(){var d="http://www.search.txcourts.gov/",p="CaseSearch.aspx?coa=cossup",gs=window.getSelection();if(!gs.isCollapsed){var cnc=gs.getRangeAt(0),sc=cnc.startContainer;if(typeof sc.data!="undefined"){var cn=sc.data.substr(cnc.startOffset,cnc.endOffset-cnc.startOffset);cn=cn.replace(/\u2013/g,"-").replace(/^[^\d]+|[^CRV\d]+$/g,"");if(cn.match(/C[RV]$/)){var s=cn.split("-");s[0]=("00"+s[0]).slice(-2);s[1]=("00"+s[1]).slice(-2);s[2]=("00000"+s[2]).slice(-5);cn=s.join("-")}if(cn!=""){p="Case.aspx?cn="+cn}}}window.open(d+p)}TAMESSearch()

See the next section for additional instructions.

How to Use It

For instructions on how to add it to your browser (at least for Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera), please see the instructions on this page.

A Couple of Notes

Bookmarklets consist of JavaScript, so you must enable JavaScript in your browser. If you're able to use Westlaw, it's almost certainly already turned on.

Using this tool may trigger your popup blocker the first time you use it on a site. If so, just tell the popup blocker to allow all popups on the site in question.