Appellate Law

TrueFiling comes to the Second District Court of Appeal

By Greg May

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 proof of service.”

The full rules area available in the Electronic Formatting Requirements and Guidelines of the Second District (the “rules”). As the name suggests, some things are mandatory, others are not. The rules include a “style manual” of sorts with recommendations for fonts, margins, line spacing, and text alignment, among other things. Curiously, some of these guidelines advise noncompliance with the rules of court. For example, rule 8.204(b)(5) states that “lines of text must be unnumbered and at least one-and-a-half-spaced,” but paragraph 8 of the guidelines suggests line spacing of 1.2 lines. My guess is that 99.9% of people aren’t going to care about these differences, but they will drive the other 0.1% nuts.

Use of TrueFiling becomes mandatory in the second district on October 30, 2017.

Full post as published by The California Blog of Appeal on September 25, 2017 (boomark / email).