Anyone else notice that certain state court portals treat hyphens as spaces? I’ve had cases in Cook County where “Smith-Jones” only surfaced records when I ran “Smith Jones,” so what do you use to normalize names before searching, and any tools you like that catch these edge cases?
I run names through a quick regex before searching — replace all non-letters with a single space and trim — so “Smith-Jones” becomes “Smith Jones,” which catches portals that “treat hyphens as spaces.” Caveat: a few sites still expect the literal hyphen, so I test both the cleaned and the original once; have you noticed which other counties are fussy?
When a portal flakes on hyphens, I ditch full names and run last name only with DOB; it bypasses the “treat hyphens as spaces” quirk and surfaces the same person across variants. Caveat: a few older county systems ignore DOB filters, so I’ll swap in a city or case year as the limiter; you seeing the same issue with apostrophes too?