eService Center & Washington Courts FAQs

What is the interpretation of the superior court case number format?

District and Municipal Court Case Number Format:

Case numbers assigned by courts of limited jurisdiction (district and municipal courts) are determined by each court.  Such case numbers may consist of all numbers, numbers and letters, or even include other characters such as a dash (-).  Although certain courts may attach specific meaning to the case numbers used by their court (such as court branch, type of case, year filed, etc.), these case numbers have no particular meaning to others outside of the court.  If you want to know the meaning of a certain district or municipal court's case number format, contact the court.  The Court Directory provides contact information for Washington State courts. 

Superior Courts:

The first two digits of the case number are used to indicate the year the case was filed.  The third digit is used to designate the case type.  The next series of digits is the actual sequential number of the case beginning from 00001 in the current year.  The last digit of the case number is called a check digit and is used by the computer to verify the correctness of the previous digits. 

Example:  Case number 93 1 00042 7 shows that the case was the 42nd criminal case filed in 1993.  The check-digit is seven. 

*Restricted Case Types--not available for public access.

For statistical purposes, some cases that predate a court's use of the Superior Court Management Information System (SCOMIS) were entered into SCOMIS using a number format as described below:  1-00001

The first digit is the case type (see table above).  The next set of digits is the sequence number.  This is referred to as a non-SCOMIS number.

Superior Courts on Odyssey:

For Superior Courts who have implemented the Odyssey case management system, the new format is similar to the old format; the only difference is the county number is now at the end where the check digit used to be located.

For example:  Lewis County is S21 in JIS/SCOMIS. All of their cases will now end in 21 instead of the check digit that traditionally came at the end of the case numbers.  For example, the case number 15-1-80304-7 in JIS/SCOMIS would look like 15-1-80304-21 in Odyssey.

Washington County Codes: 

RN id: 309