Second DCA Cleared for E-Filing

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The Florida Supreme Court has announced that the Second District Court of Appeal will be implementing appellate filing through the statewide e-portal. The other DCAs that have gone to electronic filing have used the eDCA system pioneered by the First District, so this will be the first DCA to use the statewide e-filing system. See Administrative Order No. AOSC13-29 [.pdf]. The court will begin accepting voluntary e-filing on August 19, 2013, with efiling becoming mandatory October 1, 2013.

In anticipation of the change, the Second District Clerk’s office will be holding a training session on appellate filing on July 31, 2013 at 2 pm in the Stetson Law School courtroom [.pdf of announcement]. Given how different the ePortal is from eDCA, I am sure the training will be quite interesting.

Bye Bye, Expanded Record Excerpts!

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Just in time for the Florida Bar Annual Meeting, the Eleventh Circuit issued a new Administrative Order, General Order 39 [.pdf], significantly reducing the documents that a party must provide to the Court in paper form. As regular readers or 11th Circuit practitioners might recall, the “Expanded Record Excerpts” the Court had been requiring to go along with the electronic record was quite burdensome to clients and attorneys and generated an enormous amount of paper.

It’s kind of funny that the Court in its electronic records program requires the trial court to ensure that the electronic record be in text-searchable format, but the General Order posted on the Court’s website is not. Still, this is a big step forward for appellate practitioners in the Eleventh Circuit. This change no doubt stems from the lively conversation at February’s Eleventh Circuit Appellate Practice Institute [.pdf], so it’s great to hear that the Court was so responsive in balancing the needs of its judges with the practicalities faced by its advocates.

11th Circuit ECF Now Mandatory, But So Is Killing Trees

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April 1 is a popular day for electronic filing switch overs. The Eleventh Circuit’s transition to ECF, as of this week, is complete. As announced in February, ECF filing is required for all attorneys, though be sure to read the rules carefully because there are still many documents that need to be filed conventionally as well as electronically. As the Court explains in its ECF Guide [.pdf]:

Use of the ECF system does not modify the requirements of the circuit rules
that counsel must provide to the Court the required number of paper copies
of a brief, a petition for rehearing, or a petition for rehearing en banc,
specified in the circuit rules.

More ominously, if your case is part Electronic Records on Appeal Program, you must continue to file expanded record excerpts in conformance with the applicable General Orders and the Electronic Records on Appeal Program Components. As many appellate practitioners have pointed out, the expanded record excerpts are quite a paper burden, which makes the idea of this being an “electronic” record somewhat of a joke. But that’s an issue for another post. In the meantime, be sure to read the rules very carefully, because while attorneys now must file via ECF, you will still need to produce lots of paper copies throughout the course of an appeal in the Eleventh Circuit.