Appellate Law

Some technical help for e-filing in the Court of Appeal

By Greg May

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 it will be helpful even for those who don’t know a PDF from a DOC and think Adobe Acrobat is a circus performer. I consider myself pretty tech-savvy on PDF creation and manipulation, and I still learned from it.

I think the guide will be particularly helpful for solos, who don’t always have the staff to handle the tech side of things and must rely on a DYI approach. However, the use of Adobe Acrobat, the PDF application used in the guide, can be cost-prohibitive for solos on a budget (though I believe it is now available through a monthly subscription). Keep in mind that there are alternative, less expensive PDF applications that can probably do everything you need for electronic filing, including PDF Pen for the Mac and Nitro Pro for the PC. (I have used both, but I am not endorsing either of them. Both offer free trials, so you can be sure they do what you need before purchasing.) I use Acrobat now because it came free with my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner (an awesome piece of hardware).

Don’t forget that e-filing practices are not uniform throughout the state. Always check the particular procedures for your district. But this guide should help you no matter where you practice.

Full post as published by The California Blog of Appeal on August 20, 2015 (boomark / email).