Thursday, April 15, 2004

On the necessities for e-filing in federal court

PDF for lawyers offers this account of what is required.

His nutshell description is this:

"Create your pleading or other filing using your regular word processing software. If it allows you to save as a PDF, do that. If you use Acrobat or some other PDF-creating software, go through the required steps. If this basic creation process is any harder than selecting a printer and printing the document, think about a different software package.

Scan your paper, save the files as PDFs. Although the court basics don't say so, I'd OCR these documents as a courtesy in order to allow text searches. Give your documents human readable names if possible.

Log on to your court’s website using your (approved) browser, and let her rip."

Here is a short summary of my latest e-filing experience: I uploaded an unopposed motion with a draft order and got the confirmatory e-mail at 3:06 pm on Wednesday, and got back the e-mail notice with the link to the signed order at 11:37 am Thursday morning.

The only ambiguity about the e-filing interface is figuring out how to pick from the list of choices (which party, which kind of filing, related to which other filing) and fill in the blanks to correctly describe what it is that you are filing. (Another mini-anxiety I have is whether I uploaded the right file.)

No comments: