All About e-Filing

This is a sort of blog on e-filing, that holy grail of the elusive paperless law office. We'll keep adding tips and information, and we'd love to hear from anyone who has any suggestions.

Registering For e-Filing in Federal District Courts

By Law Vendors staff | August 30, 2009

Each attorney who will sign a document to be filed in a Federal District court needs to have a Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) account in each district in which they practice. For example, an attorney practicing in all four Texas districts (Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western) will have to do four separate registrations. Each court has its own registration form.

NOTE: Some courts are automatically issuing logins and passwords to attorneys who are applying for the first time for admission in a particular district, so those attorneys do not need to register. If an attorney is already admitted to practice but does not have a login and password, they need to register for CM/ECF.

Here are links to the Texas registration forms:

Eastern District registration form
Northern District registration form (print)
Northern District registration form (online)
Southern District registration form
Southern District registration form (bankruptcy)
Western District registration form

Submit the registration form to the court, and the clerk will issue a password and login for each attorney that will allow e-filing in any of the courts within that district.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When documents are filed, the court sends an email to all parties notifying them of the filing with a link to filed document. The court allows three email addresses for each registering attorney, so paralegals and secretaries should add their email address to that attorney’s list. That way you can see the documents come in.

Goodbye To Transmittal Letters

By Law Vendors staff

The Federal courts are not interested in your correspondence. They do not want and will not accept cover letters, nor do they want vacation letters or Rule 11 letters.

So what takes the place of transmittal letters? How do you document filing? Upon completion of an e-filing, you'll be able to print out a confirmation page that the document was successfully filed with the court. Also, e-filing systems automatically generate an email to all parties in a suit notifying them that a particular document has been filed. I print out this email and put it in the correspondence folder of that case's file, which, along with the confirmation page, works far better than a transmittal letter to confirm when a document was filed and who received it.

Another tip: that confirming email from the court will also have a link to the document you just filed, only now the document has the court's digital file stamp on it. In federal court it's basically a time and date stamp across the top of the page. Click on the link to open the PDF of the file-stamped document, then save a copy of that PDF onto your computer system. Now you have a file-marked copy of your freshly-filed document that you can print out anytime you need, or that you can email to a client or another party. Obviously you can also print it out to put a file-stamped copy in your pleadings folder.

Best of all, you get that file-stamped copy back within minutes of filing it - as opposed to the days it would have taken through the mail.

Preparing A Document

By Law Vendors staff

E-filing requires that a document be in PDF format. The courts prefer (and some require) that a document is converted to PDF rather than printed and scanned. Why? Because a scanner produces a PDF document that is, in essence, a photo of the document. This type of document cannot be “read” by a computer – you cannot select, copy, and paste text from such a PDF into a Word document.

Converting, however, is easier and faster than scanning. Newer versions of most word-processing software can convert a document to PDF. If you have an older version, you can use free downloadable software like CutePDF Writer, which is safe and easy to use. Another side benefit: converted PDF documents are much smaller files than scanned PDF documents, and so are easier to email to a client.

A converted document, however, cannot be physically signed by an attorney. For converted documents, use the digital signature block: “/s/” followed by the attorney’s name. For example:

/s/ John Doe

This is acceptable to any court.

I typically print out the document, get the attorney to give it final approval and sign it. That printed copy goes into the file (if for no other reason than to prove that the attorney approved it). Then return to the computer, type in a digital signature block, and convert the document to PDF.

If a document has attachments, like a proposed order or exhibits, the attachments should be separate PDF files.