In April the Oregon State Bar will publish my article, “Zero Tolerance for E-Filing Errors: How to Avoid Committing Malpractice with a Few Clicks of Your Mouse.”  I don’t want to give all my tips away (smile), but here is a small snippet to whet your appetite:

While some courts have excused lawyers for missing a deadline due to an errant spam filter, [1] most are not given a second chance.  Follow these steps to prevent court notices and other important e-mails from getting blocked:

Smart Spam and Junk Mail Filtering

• Practice whitelisting. Set your spam or junk e-mail filters to allow receipt of e-mails from approved senders or domains. Include courts, administrative agencies, key clients, opposing counsel, and any other senders whose e-mail you don’t want to miss. You may need to make this change at the ISP level and in the settings of your specific e-mail program.  If you aren’t sure how to whitelist a sender or domain, search the Help or Support pages for your e-mail program or provider.
• Review quarantine summaries daily.  Aggressive spam filters like Google’s Postini® will occasionally block senders and domains you have added to your whitelist if the filter finds content in the e-mail to be possible spam.  Court e-mail addresses and domains can also change, causing new notices to be marked as spam.
• Check junk mail folders daily.  Approved senders and domains can make it past your ISP or server-level spam filter, then land in your e-mail program’s junk mail folder.  Outlook permits users to disable automatic filtering of junk mail to avoid this problem, but understand that if Outlook believes a message originated from a blocked sender, it will still land in your junk mail folder. The best practice is to check your junk mail folder regardless.

Safety First

• Once you’ve learned how to retrieve docket activity online, consider making it a weekly routine. Every Friday, run a docket activity report for a specified date range or search circuit court calendars online.  Compare the court’s calendar with yours and update your calendar if necessary.
• Thoroughly train support staff – on CM/ECF systems, proper handling of court notices, and technology in general.
• If you have no staff, consider creating a secondary e-mail account for yourself to use exclusively for court notices.  Include it in ECF court filings whenever permitted.  If your primary e-mail account goes down, you can check the second account.
• If you’re experiencing problems, tell the court. The attorney who lost the right to arbitrate in Philadelphia would probably still have a viable $35,000 fee claim if he had just picked up the phone. According to the judge, “A telephone call to [my] chambers might have avoided the whole predicament.”

Copyright 2012 Beverly Michaelis