Good ECF habits: Electronic Case Filing, one further thought

One important thing legal secretaries need to bear in mind when using ECF.Know how, when your lawyer sends out a letter with The Biggest Grammar Gaffe of All Time, and he will not let you correct it? Have you ever removed your initials from a letter like that, in the hope that the recipient won’t think it’s you who doesn’t understand subject-verb agreement, or who thinks “myself” is simply a more dignified form of “me”?

Yeah? Well, consider this: If you’re signed up to receive copies of your lawyer’s ECF notification e-mails (as you darn well ought to be), then the clerks of court know who you are, and what’s more, they know it’s you doing the filing for your lawyer. That’s how I managed to get a compliment from the clerk on my docketing: the clerk checked to see who was signed up for copies of my lawyer’s notifications, and she made sure to send the compliment to both of us. I also got a personal smackdown when that same lawyer, while I was on vacation, filed a proposed protective order as a standalone document.

So . . . fat-fingered electronic filing makes your lawyer look dumb. But it makes you look dumb, too, and in front of the very people whose good side you want to stay on.