Electronic filing made the news in June 2021. The Florida Bar News reported that the state court's "Filing Stats are Other Worldly?" In March 2021, the state court filing system received "1.8 million submissions." That is a great many documents. By comparison, the OJCC received 51,423 filings in the same period. That is about 3% of the state court filings. There are perhaps 1,000 Article V judges in Florida, and so the 31 JCCs are about 3% of that. Arguably, the filing volumes are reasonably similar judge by judge.
The point of the Bar News article is somewhat celebratory regarding filing volumes; March appears to be their best month ever. A few of us are old enough to remember when the naysayers insisted that this "electronic filing thing" would never work. I vividly remember an attorney laughing aloud while explaining to me that "some lawyers will never do that." His office soon thereafter excelled at the process saved money, and the lawyer later sheepishly conceded his error. It has been a journey, and to your credit, it has been a good one.
But, the civil filing portal is challenged by file format. Unlike the OJCC, the filing portal allows documents in a variety of formats including Word and two major categories of Portable Document Format (PDF). These are the "scanned" and the "preferred text-based" PDF, which the article refers to as PDF/A. There is a bit to unpack there. The critical distinction between scanned PDF and converted PDF is that the scanned document is not usually automatically ready for character recognition; the document cannot be searched for keywords. That is called "OCR" or "optical character recognition."
The Supreme Court adopted PDF/A as the standard for Article V. court proceedings in July 2019, but that was largely unnoticed. The court set a requirement for clerks to store using this document format by December 31, 2020. The announcement acknowledged that other types of documents would be filed, and thus required the clerks to "check each document . . . and convert documents that are filed in the other allowed formats." Thus, there is a workload on the court clerks to accommodate the variety of accepted format styles. Some are advocating education to alleviate that workload, and others are advocating a "service" charge for filers to pay the clerks to perform that conversion (or they could do the conversion themselves before filing).
The filing portal officials have chosen the searchable, which they call PDF/A. However, the distinctions between PDF and PDF/A are deeper. For example, some kinds of content cannot be included in PDF/A, such as "embed(ed) audio, video, and executable files," according to DifferenceBetween.net. It will not allow "external references," and will require that "graphics and fonts be embedded" so that the PDF/A is freestanding and viewable in the future regardless of the continuing availability of other software, connections, fonts, or supports. And, PDF/A cannot be encrypted. It is a format intended for archiving accessible documents.
The OJCC has experienced some recent questions about the format. A very few lawyers who are embracing the PDF/A for the sake of the courts have experienced some fleeting and sporadic issues with e-JCC filing, but not a significant number have had issues. The e-JCC platform will accept any PDF document for filing.
Therefore, the best advice for attorneys is to strive to convert documents from software like Word or WordPerfect. When that is not possible, using a program such as Adobe the lawyer can format a scanned document for "character recognition." Then click "file," "save as," "more options," and PDF/A. The resulting document should be useable for either the court filing portal or e-JCC.
Of course, the Adobe program has a cost. There are many other programs available that allow conversion to the OCR format. EasePDF offers an article on their picks for the best free OCR. Wondershare offers a perspective. In fact, a simple web search for "a list of free software to convert scanned pdf to ocr" will produce a variety of sources to find free software for this purpose. Practitioners should both see the future, and begin to adapt. In the workers' compensation community, that means PDF in an OCR format is ideal.
In the Florida court practice, that may soon mean a similar requirement. Lawyers would be well advised to transition to such a format before the courts and clerks become less forgiving. In short, now is a good time to gain this functionality, PDF in OCR, and be prepared for the future. This should not create any issues if the same OCR format is used for OJCC filings. In short, one adjustment in the process will aid in both court and OJCC practice.
