SCOKY Issues Revised Administrative Rules Governing eFiling; AOC Adds More Counties to eFiling

The Kentucky Supreme Court recently issued revised administrative rules governing electronic filing (“eFiling”), effective January 15, 2015. The updated rules, which supersede those issued in May 2014, may be accessed at this link:

https://courts.ky.gov/courts/supreme/Rules_Procedures/201502.pdf

Among the revisions are: new rules permitting eFiling in criminal cases; a provision that an error by an eFiler must be corrected within two business days of receipt of a deficiency notice in order to preserve the original timestamp on a NEF (Section 8(3)(b)); a provision that conventionally filed paper documents may be scanned by the clerk and made accessible on CourtNet 2.0 (once the clerk has the technological capability to do so) (Section 8(6)(c)); additional provisions governing disputes to an eFiled document’s authenticity made before and after 14 days of service of the document (Section 10(5)(a) and (b)); a provision for eFiling warning order attorney affidavits (Section 11(2)(a)(v)); and a provision allowing eFiling of proof of service of a subpoena (Section 11(3)).

In separate action, the Administrative Office of the Courts (“AOC”) recently added the following eight Western Kentucky counties to the roster of counties that allow eFiling: Christian, Crittenden, Henderson, Hopkins, McLean, Muhlenberg, Union and Webster. Those counties join the following judicial circuits in permitting eFiling: Boone and Gallatin; Bourbon, Scott and Woodford; Campbell; Clark and Madison; Daviess; Fayette; Franklin; Henry, Oldham and Trimble; Johnson, Lawrence and Martin; and Kenton. AOC’s goal is to have eFiling in all 120 counties by the end of 2015.

To be permitted to eFile, an attorney must be registered to do so after completing certification by attending one of the training sessions periodically put on by AOC.

Practitioners should not confuse eFiling with electronic service under CR 5.02(2), which does not require registration or certification. Rather, the only requirements to make and receive electronic service are having an electronic service address and filing a notice of election of electronic service as provided in CR 5.02(2).

Note: The foregoing post includes commentary reprinted from the forthcoming 2015 supplement to 6 Philipps & Kramer, Rules of Civil Procedure Annotated, 6th ed. (Kentucky Practice Series), by David V. Kramer, with permission of the author and publisher. Copyright (c) 2015 Thomson Reuters. For more information about this publication click here.