Goodin made up its own schema because the Illinois Supreme Court guidance on e-citation (add link) contains no data format standards, and sometimes it even conflicts with ADR.
What offenses are eligible for direct filing from law enforcement to the Clerk? Of course, only offenses eligible for use on a uniform complaint citation (UCC) are eligible for direct filing. But some UCC-eligible offenses should really go through the SA, so the AOIC strongly recommends that you consult your SA when setting up the e-citation vendor's system is in your county.
DUI offenses are of particular concern to SAs.
There are other misdemeanors which are eligible for filing under the UCC (street racing, fleeing, etc.), but if your SA isn't involved with deciding which charges will always come to the SA rather than be direct-filed with the Clerk, it might be wise to have the e-citation system exclude or prevent the transmission of all misdemeanors. Paper citations could then be written and provided to the SA, and there would be less chance of inadvertently direct-filing something which the SA would want to handle.
The court might save some data entry if the e-citation vendor supplies the hearing type for ticketed offenses, based on local practice. Most courts use First Appearance, though some use Arraignment.
It is the e-citation vendor’s responsibility to not send us the same data twice. We cannot use ticket number to spot duplicates because they roll over and repeat. We can’t use incident ID assigned by the e-citation system because it will show up more than once if law enforcement can send different tickets from one incident (traffic stop) at different times. If the e-citation vendor provides GAL a value for the md5 attribute in each data file (see e-citation schema), GAL may eventually use it to spot duplicates within a batch of tickets which Clerk staff have downloaded to process. But such a process won’t tell us that a ticket in today’s batch is a duplicate of one in yesterday’s batch.
Why do our e-citation tools make a separate case for every charge, even on ordinance violations? SCR 552 says, “Each Uniform Citation and Complaint form and conservation complaint shall upon receipt by the clerk be assigned a separate case number, chronologically, including multiple citations issued to the same accused for more than one offense arising out of the same occurrence (see Rule 503(a))”. The RKM (Part 1, Section B, Page 5) makes one exception, for DUIs. So if a code enforcement unit wants multiple counts on the same case, they will have to file a long-form complaint.