Perhaps the title of this post should be the other way around: The Second District Court of Appeal comes to TrueFiling. Although the The Second District has had e-filing for some document sin place for several years, it appears to be the last appellate court in the state to embrace e-filing of everything via TrueFiling. With the upgrade come some new formatting requirements that were previously only suggestions. Electronically filed documents must now include electronic bookmarks to “to each heading, subheading and component of the document, such as the table of contents, table of authorities, petition, verification, points and authorities, declaration, certificate of word count, certificate of interested entities or persons, and…
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Mandatory e-filing in the California Supreme Court is imminent – learn the rules!
The California Supreme Court adopted voluntary e-filing this summer, but e-filing will become mandatory on September 1, 2017. The court uses the TrueFiling system, which I have found to be rather user-friendly. The Supreme Court’s e-filing rules are available in PDF format on the court’s website, and they are extensive. Some highlights: [Added 9/6/17: do not rely on this summary to ensure your compliance with the rules. Reference the rules on the court’s website, which may change form time to time without such changes being noted in this blog post.] ?E-filing becomes mandatory on September 1, 2017, even for cases initiated prior to that date. (Rule 3(b).) ?As in many other courts, self-represented litigants are exempted from mandatory e-filing.…
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How flexible is that midnight electronic filing deadline in federal court?
When I was a young lawyer, my mentor told me, “Practice law as if the rules will always be strictly enforced against you but will never be strictly enforced against the adverse party.” Wise words. Last week I posted about a party that applied for a 15-minute extension of time to file its documents with the federal district court in Ohio because of some technical difficulties it encountered with the electronic filing. In doing so, it lived out the first half of my mentor’s adage, as it did not assume that it would get a break of even 15 minutes without explicitly requesting such relief. In Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC, et al. v. Microsoft Corporation, a patent infringement case in…
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The 15-minute filing extension, brought to you by the era of midnight electronic filing deadlines
When I was in law school, my wife was an assistant to a department head in an environmental consulting firm. Frequently, when I asked her what kind of day she’d had at work, she would respond that the scientists had made her day nuts by working on a project proposal at the last minute, forcing the support staff to scramble like mad to make the FedEx deadline (usually 5 p.m. for those of us on the west coast). After hearing this a lot, I asked — with great naivete — “Has anyone ever considered getting the project done before the last minute?” Then I got to my Big Law firm, and saw…
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Second District Court of Appeal to implement TrueFiling e-filing system in late 2016
According to a notice I received today from the California Appellate Project: The clerk of the 2nd District Court of Appeal has asked us to inform the panel that True Filing will be available in this district beginning in November. For two months, November and December, True Filing will coexist with the present eFiling system presently being used in the district. The choice of which to use will be yours. Then, in January, the present eFiling system will disappear, and everyone will be required to use True Filing. Those of you already working in other districts with True Filing will definitely have a leg up on the rest of us.…
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Some technical help for e-filing in the Court of Appeal
This week, the Second District Court of Appeal published a terrific guide for creating electronic documents. (PDF link) The guide is broken down into a section on briefs and a section on appendices, and is meant as a technical guide, not a set of rules for filing. It is thus helpful regardless of the district your appeal is in. The guide provides the nitty-gritty detailed steps, with illustrations, for creating, editing, and formatting documents for electronic filing, including instructions for safely and securely redacting information, adding bookmarks, and making scanned documents text-searchable, among other things. Unfortunately, instructions on hyperlinking have been deferred to a future edition. I wouldn’t quite call it Electronic Filing for Dummies, though…