“Federal appeals court proposes rolling back midnight e-filing deadline”: Nate Raymond of Reuters has this report.

Thank you for seeking to improve the quality of our lives! Several longtime readers of this blog, who make this endeavor worth doing, have kindly emailed to observe that the likely motivation behind the proposed local rule changes that the Third Circuit announced this morning is to improve the quality of life for appellate lawyers and their staff.

For example, the Third Circuit’s current chief judge, Michael A. Chagares, while he was serving as chair of the Advisory Committee on the Appellate Rules, proposed in June 2019 that the electronic filing deadline in all federal appellate courts should be moved back from midnight to when the clerk’s office closed. Apparently that proposal failed to gain traction nationwide, but perhaps now it can be tried in the Third Circuit. And the Delaware judiciary, in July 2018, in a news release titled “The Delaware Supreme Court adopts policies to improve work life balance,” announced that it was moving its e-filing deadline from 11:59 p.m. to 5 p.m.

As someone who has been an appellate attorney in private practice for more than 30 years, I think that appellate lawyers in general have a pretty good quality of life, and I do not think that eliminating an 11:59:59 p.m. electronic filing deadline — which does not prevent one from filing a paper at 10 a.m. on its due date or even on any day before the due date — would appreciably improve my quality of life. Maybe next the Third Circuit will require attorneys to certify that they have been eating right, getting enough exercise, and have been enjoying at least eight hours of sleep per night before being permitted to file a document.

Finally, as currently configured, the Third Circuit’s CM/ECF filing system doesn’t note the time of filing on a document’s time-stamp. Perhaps the system will need to be altered to provide that information, or maybe the electronic date will simply default to the next day’s date at 5:00:01 (or 5:01) p.m. each day. At a minimum, this will definitely result in lots of motion practice from those unfortunate enough not to successfully press the “file” button by the 5 p.m. deadline. I cannot envision that the Third Circuit would actually treat as untimely documents filed soon after 5 p.m. if the filing attorney offered a legitimate excuse for the delay.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit requests comments on proposed change to its Local Rules that would establish 5 p.m. eastern time deadline for documents filed in-person and electronically: You can access the proposed Local Rule amendments via this link. The deadline for comment is February 18, 2023 (presumably by 5 p.m. eastern time, although the notice does not specify this). Comments can be emailed to [email protected].

One “feature” of electronic filing is that the filer ordinarily (meaning unless a local rule provides otherwise) has until 11:59 p.m. local time on the day a filing is due to timely file a document. I’m not sure what the Third Circuit’s rule change is seeking to accomplish. Although documents filed “after-hours” ordinarily will not be processed until the next day, presumably the same is true for documents filed shortly before the 5 p.m. closing time of the Clerk’s Office.

In any event, it will be interesting to see whether advocates will oppose this effort to adopt a filing deadline that is six hours and fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds earlier than currently applies.

“The Supreme Court Justices Do Not Seem to Be Getting Along; Collegiality is scarce, and tensions are apparent”: Steven Mazie has this article online at The Atlantic.