File Naming Conventions for Opinions at the
Seventh Court of Appeals

This article is a brief addendum to an article entitled Electronic Distribution of Opinions Citation Issues. It describes the system used for naming opinion files at the Seventh Court of Appeals of Texas. The court's system is based on the docket number of the proceeding. Docket numbers consist of the court number, a two digit year identifier, a sequential number, and two characters to distinguish between criminal and civil actions. For example the first civil appeal filed in 1998 would have the docket number:

07-98-0001-CV

Because one proceeding may generate several opinions, use of the docket number alone is inadequate for generating file names. Some method is needed for distinguishing individual opinions. Since it is unlikely that any proceeding will generate more than 26 opinions, a single alphabetic character can be used to distinguish individual opinions.

In an effort to promote wide accessability we have adhered to the eleven character file naming limitations of DOS. The three character extension is used to identify the document format. Currently the opinion archive contains only WordPerfect versions of the court's opinions and therefore have the extension .WPD. This leaves eight characters to identify the opinion. The court's system uses the year, sequential docket number, docket identifier (criminal or civil) and sequential opinion identifier. The first opinion generated in an appeal with the docket number listed above would be:

98-001VA.WPD

The name can be described by the position of each character in the following way:

1-2	Two digit year identifier
3	Dash (used for readability. This can be used as part of the sequential number for those courts that have more than 999 proceedings filed in a year).
4-6	Three digit sequential number of the proceeding.
7	Docket identifier V for civil and R for criminal.
8	Sequential opinion identifier for that docket number.
10-12	Three character document type.

Below is an example of how this type of name can be generated from a docket number and opinion identifier.

Public Sub CreateName(DockNum As String, Seq As String)

    Dim Yr As Integer
    Dim DNum As String
    Dim DNumLen As Integer
    Dim Dock As String
    Dim FName As String

    Yr = Mid(DockNum, 4, 2)
    'Extract the last three characters of the docket number
    DnumLen = InStr(7, DockNum, "-") - 7
    DNum = Mid(DockNum, 7, DNumLen)
    If Len(DNum) > 3 Then
        DNum = Right(DNum, 3)
    ElseIf Len(DNum) < 3 Then
        Do Until Len(DNum) = 3
           Dnum = "0" & DNum
        Loop
    End If

    'Determine if case is on Civil "V" or Criminal "R" docket
    Dock = UCase(Right(DockNum, 1))

    FName = Yr & "-" & DNum & Dock & Seq & ".WPD"

End Sub

Clint Sare 4/3/98