E-Filing and E-Service

What a click finishes

What turns a finished motion into one that is filed and served in a Florida court? In one sense, a single click. A filer presses Submit on the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, the Portal stamps the document, and under the rules it is filed at that moment and served on everyone the filer chose. Everything that makes the click safe has to happen before it. This reading follows one filing through its parts in the order a careful filer checks them: the pages, what the pages may say, the login behind the click, and the people the click reaches. Then it crosses to the federal courts, where reading someone else’s filing costs money by the page. In the activity, you do all of this for a motion Kim Nguyen wants filed on Monday.

Start with the pages. Rule 2.520(a) sets the document format for anything a lawyer or party writes for filing: letter-size pages, numbered in order, with margins of at least an inch and type no smaller than 12 points. The Portal enforces part of it on its own. Upload a page larger than 8½ by 11 inches, and the E-Filer User Manual (opens in a new tab) says you will get an error and have to fix the page before going on.

The rest comes from the Florida Courts Technology Standards, which Rule 2.520(b) applies to every electronic document. A filed PDF must be searchable, so a clerk or a judge can find a word in it. The Portal prefers PDF/A, an archival form of PDF meant to look the same on any computer years from now, and a PDF/A filing may not carry comments, annotations, or hidden deleted text. That last point is easy to miss. A Word file keeps the notes its authors left in the margin, and a PDF made from it can keep them too, depending on how it is saved.

Papers the firm did not write, such as the other side’s discovery response or a store’s records, cannot be filed alone. Rule 2.520(d) has them appended as exhibits to a document the filer prepared, such as the motion that relies on them. They answer to the technology standards, not to the margins and type size of subdivision (a).

The last page of a motion carries requirements of its own, the signature block and certificates. Rule 2.515(c) lists what the signature block holds, down to the e-mail address for service and the lawyer’s Florida Bar number. Since 2025, most non-dispositive motions also need a certificate, under Rule 1.202, that the lawyer tried to resolve the dispute with the other side before filing. The certificate of service, last, says who was served, where, when, and how.

What a public file may not say

A court file is a public record, and anyone can read most of what lands in one. Rule 2.425 decides how much of a person’s identifying information can land there, and it sorts that information by the harm it could do. A Social Security number, a bank account number, or a credit, charge, or debit card number may not appear at all, not even its last four digits. A driver’s license, telephone, insurance policy, or customer account number may show its last four digits. A minor appears by initials, and a birth date by its year. So one page of an exhibit can call for three different treatments: a card number removed entirely, a phone number cut to four digits, and a child’s name cut to initials.

The rule sets a limit, not a target. A filer who removes more than it requires still complies, and one who leaves more has broken it, however the extra digits got there. Its minimization of sensitive information has specific exceptions. An account number can stay when the account is the property the case is about, and information that is relevant and material to an issue before the court falls outside the rule.

Some information is not only limited but confidential. Rule 2.420(d)(1)(B) lists it, from adoption records to documents about settling a minor’s claim, and the list includes Social Security and account numbers. A filer whose document contains any of it must file a Notice of Confidential Information within Court Filing at the same time, pointing to where it is. In most civil cases, the clerk does not have to protect what the filer never flagged. And under Rule 2.515(d), filing a document is itself a promise that its confidential and sensitive information was handled under both rules.

Removing a number is not the same as covering it. A black rectangle drawn over a number in a PDF hides the digits from the eye and leaves them in the file. Search the document for them, or select the page’s text and paste it into a plain-text editor, and they come back. A true redaction takes the text out. Some free tools do it by turning each redacted page into a picture, which removes the text but leaves the page unsearchable. The page then needs OCR, the text recognition that rebuilds a searchable layer. Either way, the check is the same: search for what should be gone.

Whose click it is

Since July 1, 2025, Florida’s rules have named the Portal and said who acts through it. Rule 2.511 makes the E-Filing Portal the central facility for filing in Florida’s courts, and Rule 2.525 requires lawyers to use it. A person gets in as a registered user, with a login tied to a name, an address, a Bar number for a lawyer, and one to three e-mail addresses for service.

The same rule settles something every paralegal should know. Someone else may use a registered user’s login at that user’s direction, and anything done with the login is the registered user’s own act “for all purposes.” When a paralegal files Kim Nguyen’s motion with her login, the rules treat Kim as its filer and signer. The filing is also her representation that the document follows the rules on filing and service and protects the sensitive information in it. So the paralegal is not the filer in the rule’s eyes, but may be the last person to look before the lawyer is bound.

The click also fixes the time. A filed document’s date and time is the Portal’s stamp, and the manual calls the submission date on the My Submissions page “the official file stamp date and time.” On a filing’s last day, Rule 2.514 ends the day at 11:59:59 p.m., eastern time, unless a statute, local rule, or court order sets another time.

No Florida rule moves a deadline because the Portal failed. Rule 2.514 carries a last day forward when it falls on a legal holiday, which includes a day a chief judge designates, or within a time the chief justice has extended by order. A court can extend most deadlines on a motion under Rule 1.090(b), though not the time to take an appeal. A motion stamped at 11:58 p.m. on its last day is on time. One that could not get through at 11:58 p.m. needs an order.

What happens after the click depends on what went in. Rule 2.525(f) tells the clerk to docket every document submitted, with a short list of exceptions. They include a wrong case number that cannot be sorted out, a missing or wrong case style, several documents filed as one, and a file that is blank or unreadable. A document with one of those defects goes to a correction queue. The filer then has 30 days from the notice to file a corrected, substantially identical version, which relates back to the first attempt. Everything else is docketed, even a motion with narrow margins, and the clerk may note the problem, after which the court may strike the document.

Service happens at the click

On August 8, 2025, Ricardy Banks filed a motion asking the judge in his Broward County family case to step aside. Most filings are never served on the judge, but the rule on disqualifying a judge requires it, so Banks served the motion on the judge through the Portal. He also e-mailed it to the address the judge had given for all correspondence with the court. Under Rule 2.330, a motion to disqualify that is not denied within 30 days of service is deemed granted. The judge denied it forty-five days later, writing that it was “never served.” In Banks v. Banks (opens in a new tab), the Fourth District quashed that order and held the motion deemed granted. The judge might not have seen the motion in time, the court allowed, but it had been served.

Portal service works that way for every recipient. Rule 2.516(b)(1) requires a document filed through the Portal to be served through the Portal’s e-service, and service on each recipient on the list is complete on filing. Whether the recipient opened anything does not decide it. The list decides it, and the list is the filer’s job. The Portal sends its notice only to the recipients the filer selects, and the rule makes the filer serve by some other permitted means anyone the filer learns did not receive the document.

Service did not always work this way. Before July 2025, the rule required service by e-mail, which a filer could make through the Portal or send directly, and it prescribed the e-mail’s form. In Matte v. Caplan (opens in a new tab), a lawyer e-mailed a motion for sanctions as a Word file, under a subject line that did not give the case number. The body of the e-mail said only “See attached motion.” In 2014, the Fourth District held that the sanctions statute demanded strict compliance with the service rule, including a PDF and a subject line beginning “SERVICE OF COURT DOCUMENT,” so the motion failed. Five years later, in Wheaton v. Wheaton (opens in a new tab), the Supreme Court of Florida said Matte had overlooked that the rule then reached only documents filed with the court. It held that a proposal for settlement, which is served but not filed, was outside the rule, and that the e-mail’s form would not have defeated it anyway. Today’s rule keeps an e-mail form for a document served without being filed, and e-mail is one way to reach a recipient the Portal missed.

Receiving service is the other half. In Madill v. Rivercrest Community Ass’n (opens in a new tab), a final judgment reached one of a firm’s lawyers as an e-mail from the judge’s judicial assistant. It did not come through the court’s system the firm watched, and he never opened the attachment. The Second District found the late motion for fees that followed to be excusable neglect, because the firm had a system and the e-mail came from outside it. It also warned that lawyers who leave the court’s e-mails unopened “do so at their own peril.”

Reading the federal record

Federal courts take filings through CM/ECF, and the public reads them through PACER, which charges by the page. A document or a docket sheet costs no more than 30 pages would, opinions are free, and a user whose charges for a quarter stay at or below a set amount owes nothing. A lawyer of record gets one free copy of each filing through the notice of electronic filing, and pays like anyone else to read it again later.

The RECAP Archive grew up around that fee. Free Law Project’s RECAP extension sends each document a user buys on PACER to an archive on CourtListener, where anyone can read it for free. The archive is only as complete as the purchases behind it. The date on its copy of a docket is the last time someone pulled the docket from PACER, not the date of the case’s last filing. It may hold one document in a case and not the next. Take the case you read in the activity, Brown & Brown Insurance Services, Inc. v. Legacy Insurance Group, LLC. The archive has its notice of removal and the state court complaint and little else, and many later entries show no docket text at all.

Federal courts also have their own privacy rule, and it is looser than Florida’s. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 (opens in a new tab) lets a filing show the last four digits of a Social Security or financial account number. Florida’s rule allows no part of a Social Security or bank account number. Both courts reduce a minor to initials and a birth date to its year. A paralegal who works in both courts needs to know which rule governs each file.

Before you press Submit

Kim’s motion and its exhibits arrive with problems of several of the kinds this reading describes, and the Portal will not catch most of them. In the activity, you start in Part 1 with Kim’s email and the rules on the Florida Bar’s page. Then you log what the exhibits may and may not show before you touch the motion’s form, because the minimization work decides what the finished PDF can contain. The federal docket comes last, and the checklist you write along the way becomes the firm’s procedure for the next filing.