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| Photo: Andreas Praefcke [CC BY 3.0 ] |
We learned from a Law.com article that the New Jersey Appellate Court had affirmed an order enforcing an arbitration award after the plaintiff’s lawyer “failed to use New Jersey’s eCourts system to electronically file its demand for a trial de novo and to pay the filing fee”. Discussion follows below.
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We will focus on the section of the opinion on “The Mandatory Electronic eCourts Filing System”.
The court notes in the decision that there were several notices over six-months to attorneys that mandatory use of the eCourts E-filing system was soon to be required. The court also noted that the rules required that any paper filings would be returned to the attorney filers with a notice that the electronic system must be used. As you will see below, this is what happened in this matter.
Another part of the appeal of concern is that the attorney claimed that he “[was confused about how the $200 (filing) fee was to be paid to the [c]ourt but he never contacted the court as to ascertain the proper procedure”. Instead, on February 1, 2018, nearly four months after the mandatory eCourts electronic filing requirement in the Bergen County vicinage went into effect, counsel instructed his secretary to “immediately… prepare and file [a trial de novo demand] with appropriate payment and ascertain how the $200 fee was to be submitted”. Instead, the secretary “decided to send the trial de novo demand to the clerk of the Civil Division by Federal Express along with a check in the amount of $200”.
The clerk rejected the paper documents and notified the attorney that they must be filed electronically through eCourts. But they also gave the attorney “a break” that it would consider the subsequent electronic filing wrote that the documents “would be ‘considered received’ as of the date of entry in eCourts. They also provided the court’s contact information to help with” the filing period and the fee”.
An additional part of the story included the attorney’s secretary attempt to resubmit the demand via the eCourts system. But they still had problems with payment since they weren’t registered in that part of the system (JACS). In short, the court ultimately rejected the motion for leave to file a trial de novo demand and later rejected reconsideration.
So, there we go. The failure of an attorney and secretary to take the court’s rules and requirements for E-filing had serious consequences for their case and perhaps for their client (depending upon the outcome of their appeal of course). But it is also a good lesson on how the court enforced their rules while still trying to assist the attorney and secretary to meet the requirements.
Last, please share if you know of any other similar decisions or articles on the subject in the comment section below. I’m sure that our readers will be interested in your story as well.
*New Jersey is known as the Garden State if you wonder about the picture?
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Author’s note to the court: The court’s opinion PDF file provided on their website is in “image format” so it cannot be searched within a PDF reader. There is really no reason not to provide these files in non-searchable format these days. And if the court is concerned that someone might fraudulently use their document there are problems with this approach. First, I was able to easily OCR the document with my PDF reader. Second, one could assign a digital file stamp to verify it just as Brazil has done since 2009.
https://courttechbulletin.blogspot.com/2018/03/court-document-verification-in-brazil.html
or here
https://courttechbulletin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-ccms-smart-document-receipt-concept.html
Therefore, the format choice neither “locks” the document nor does it make is more verifiable.
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