From the desk of the Arkansas Attorney General
January 30 - February 5, 2017
Electronic filing at the Arkansas Supreme Court
Leslie Rutledge
Arkansas Attorney General
For several years, circuit courts in Arkansas have had the opportunity to participate in an electronic filing system maintained by the Administrative Office of the Courts (“eFlex”). Electronic filing through the eFlex system is similar, but not identical to the CM/ECF Pacer system used in federal courts. Electronic filing via eFlex first became mandatory in cases filed in Pulaski County in 2013. Grant County and Hot Spring County joined the ranks of mandatory electronic filing in 2016, and six additional counties are set to transition to mandatory electronic filing in 2017: Lonoke, Van Buren, Faulkner, Crawford, Benton and Miller Counties.
Arkansas’s appellate courts are also transitioning to electronic filing. From September 2015 through September 2016, the Arkansas Supreme Court entertained a pilot program for filing certain types of motions and responses electronically through the eFlex system. In September 2016, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued a per curiam opinion bringing an end to the pilot program and establishing mandatory electronic filing of appellate motions and responses. The Court also initiated a new one-year pilot program for filing appellate briefs electronically.
In In re Appellate-Motion-Electronic-Filing Pilot Project and Appellate-Brief-Electronic-Filing Pilot Project, 2016 Ark. 314 (Sept. 15, 2016) (per curiam), the Court announced that appellate motions, petitions and responses that do not initiate cases and do not require the payment of any fee must be filed electronically. The Court amended sections (a) and (b) of Rule 2-1 of the Rules of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals to include the mandatory electronic-filing requirement. In the same opinion, the Court established an appellate-brief electronic-filing project as an additional step toward “comprehensive mandatory electronic filing in the appellate courts.” Parties are now permitted to file appellate briefs via the eFlex system. The requirements for contents of briefs are unchanged except that the table of contents for any electronically-filed brief “must include hyperlinks to each section of the brief” and electronic briefs “must be internally searchable via optical character recognition (OCR) technology that is included in Adobe Acrobat.” Notably, a party that files a brief electronically is only required to submit three paper copies of the brief — due five days after the electronic brief is filed — instead of eighteen paper copies on the original deadline under Rule 4-4.
Electronic filing has been standard practice in federal court for years. It is appropriately becoming standard (and for certain filings and certain courts, mandatory) practice in an increasing number of Arkansas circuit courts and appellate courts. This modernizing shift is a welcome development for a number of reasons, not least of which is cutting down on the time and significant expense attributable to paper filings. That benefits everyone, including and perhaps especially the Arkansas taxpayer given the number of cases to which the State is a party.
To ensure attorneys become comfortable with and accustomed to electronic filing, the Arkansas Supreme Court “strongly encourage[s] attorneys who practice in the appellate courts and who have not yet obtained an eFlex account to do so.” We at the Attorney General’s office do as well.
Leslie Rutledge is the 56th Attorney General of Arkansas. Elected on Nov. 4, 2014, she is the first woman and first Republican in Arkansas history to be elected to the office.
