Federal Judiciary

Local Rules committee activity - request for input

By Michael Smith

The 2008 edition of the Eastern District's local rules committee met last week in Tyler to review an initial set of proposed rule changes.  I have been remiss in not asking readers to forward any suggestions they have for local rule amendments, so let me ask now - if there are any local rules that you think need revising or additional ones that'd be helpful, please forward them to me.  (We already have the change from FRCP 6(e) to 6(d) as a result of the national style revisions, and thanks to everyone that has pointed that out).  I am particularly interested in whether readers think that any of the recent revisions to the ND Cal's patent rules, or the new patent rules adopted by the ND Tex or SD Tex should be considered for adoption.
There is one issue in particular I wanted to solicit input on, and that is service of documents filed under seal.  Currently, the Eastern District can handle the filing of documents under seal online (and I have to note that we led the nation on that - just a few years ago filings under seal had to be made in paper
- then the clerk's office found a way to let parties do it by CD, then strained to get the capability to allow us to file documents under seal directly online).  But the documents are not served on counsel via the court's system, as documents not under seal are, so counsel hve to actually serve each other with court filings (which is just so 2004).  ED clerk Dave Maland advised the committee last week that the CM/ECF system has the capacity to set various levels of access to sealed documents, so it would be possibility for documents filed under seal to be accessible to some or all counsel automatically, and thus eliminate the need for counsel to effect serve each other.  My question to readers is whether this is something you'd be interested in, and if so, what restrictions on service would you want, i.e. would the default be that all counsel of record could view, lead counsel only, no counsel until counsel signed  up for "under seal" filings (similar to the current practice of designating lead counsel) and certified that they were authorized under the protective order to do so, or some other subset.  The benefit on online access is that it's eliminate the need to serve all counsel with under seal filings (which are sometimes voluminous) and counsel would have access likely sooner than they do now, and access to exactly the same thing the Court is looking at.  The downside is that a measure that ensures that access is limited to counsel authorized to view the documents has to be crafted. 
Thoughts?

Full post as published by Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).