Dear Valued Client:

A meeting was held on July 10, 2019 at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles attended by representatives of the Los Angeles Superior Court (“LASC”), Journal Technologies, Inc. (“JTI”), which is the Courts Electronic Filing Manager (“EFM”), and Electronic Filing Service Providers (“EFSP”) which include ACS.

After the meeting, LASC published this FAQ (Revised 7/18/2019) on the Courts website, along with a helpful Tips for an Effective Electronic Filing handout. The purpose of this recap is to inform our clients of additional topics that were discussed in the July 10 meeting that were not addressed in the FAQ published by LASC, which include:

Return of Signed Proposed Orders

In the FAQ published by LASC under #49 and #50, the Court states that signed copies of proposed orders will be electronically transmitted back to the submitting party by the EFSP. However, the issue discussed at the meeting was that signed copies of proposed orders were not being transmitted to the EFSPs. The reason was that clerks were uploading the signed proposed orders to the Courts Case Management System (“CMS”) but not into the EFM. Therefore, JTI did not receive the upload and was unable to send back the signed orders to the EFSPs.

The resolution was that Court Operations would be working with JTI to build an automated process to upload signed orders from the CMS to the EFM so that JTI can send the files back to the EFSPs, who can then make the signed orders electronically available to submitting parties.

Until the resolution is implemented, the current process is for the Court to continue mailing copies of the signed orders to the submitting parties. When accepted, the signed order will also be uploaded to the CMS and made available on the Courts Register of Action (“ROA”). Moreover, if the filing of the proposed order is rejected, the reasoning will be sent to the EFSP.

Although the Courts FAQ says otherwise, we believe this information is helpful and we wanted to inform our concerned clients so that you understand this is a feature the Court is currently working on and that ACS will still receive your signed orders.

Refund Process for Fees

In the FAQ under #38, the Court advises parties to request refunds using Form LACIV-150, which can be mailed, delivered in-person, or electronically filed. However, in order to electronically file the form, the filer must pay a fee.

The Courts finance team will be working with JTI to build a new process for EFSPs to submit refund requests without additional fees being charged. This will include a new form.

Fee Waivers

We were informed that Court clerks have been trained to check for fee waivers, however, it is ultimately the responsibility of the filer to self-certify that they qualify for a fee waiver by checking a box and filing FW-001 Request to Waive Court Fees with the appropriate documentation. Otherwise, the clerk will process the filing while charging the fee.

In addition, the EFSPs in attendance at the meeting requested that the Notice Filing Review Complete (“NFRC”) file sent by JTI specify when transactions contain fee waivers instead of populating the fee with a $0 value. JTI created a ticket so that they can work on adding this information in the future.

Backlog

The EFSPs inquired into the backlog of pending orders that appear stuck in the Courts queue. The Court advised us they were unaware of this backlog and JTI advised that they are working on the transactions that were stuck with this status. They are currently working on a fix.

Outages & Workaround to eFiling

The Court also informed the EFSPs that clerks are not always aware when there is an outage preventing parties from eFiling. JTI advised that they do send emails to clerks from their help desk. The EFSPs suggested that JTI also include a banner on their portal when outages occur so filers are also made aware of the outages.

The Court also provided a workaround for customers when an outage prevents new orders from being submitted timely. The Court stated that physical documents be submitted to Department 1 for Ex Parte motions for the Court to decide to set a different filing date. The EFSPs in attendance advised the Court that currently there is only a form titled “Exemption from eFiling” which is insufficient and requested that another form be made available for when outages occur. The Court accepted this request and stated it will provide an update at a later time, along with a new process and form. In the interim, the Court asked that paper submissions be made to Department 1.

We are providing you this notice so that you are aware of upcoming resolutions that will address some of your concerns. We will notify you of any new updates from the Court.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact a member of our customer success team.

Thank You,
Chad Barger, President

ACS Management Team

Dear Valued Client,

We understand that the LASC eFiling implementation has been an experience to say the least, and has caused numerous concerns for you due to the new eFiling system as well as Court related procedural issues.

At a recent meeting, the Court acknowledged the ongoing challenges facing attorneys, EFSP’s (Electronic Filing Service Providers) and the Court itself due in large part to the sheer size of the Court, legacy Court data issues, and users learning what the Court is requiring. They will be working with us and other partners to come up with processes to help mitigate these issues. But overall their position remains steadfast that most of the issues reflect a learning curve faced by both the legal community on how to properly submit eFilings into the Court, as well as their 150 court clerks who are continuing to be trained.

The Court provided the following feedback in response to areas of concerns raised with us by some partners.

1. Financial Issues
A. Fee waiver – The Court acknowledged that it was a configuration error that was causing fees to be assessed on filers, even if a valid fee waiver was on file or was submitted. They have fixed the problem and are working with JTI (Journal Technologies Inc. – the courts eFiling system creator) to refund any unwarranted fees to Fee Waiver filers as soon as possible. The Court has asked that the EFSP’s be patient and let their filers know that refunds will be issued soon. Stay tuned.

B. Refunds – We asked for a more formal and ideally streamlined process to be created to enable EFSP’s and filers to submit refund requests. The Court agreed and said that they would follow up with us to communicate the new process once they are ready to implement. Stay tuned.

2. Cases with Mismatched Data (Previous Physical File vs. New eFile)
A. Validation errors – The Court acknowledged that they have a data validation issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. They are even talking about relaxing certain data requirements when a user is trying to submit an eFiling in order to reduce both errors and rejected filings.

B. Enhanced Support and Escalation process – LASC provided service providers a contact at each specific court location to investigate and hopefully resolve any data- or case- related issues preventing a user from submitting an eFiling. The Court’s goal is to have a response within 72 hours on how the filer should proceed.

3. Rejections
A. Failed submissions for technical reasons – The Court said that if a filer gets a rejection for technical reasons (metadata validation issues, gateway errors, etc.), then parties should physically file an ex‐parte application for relief. They recognize that the process of filing such an application would be a resource constraint on the court and the filer, but as of now that is the only option available.

B. Clerk issues – The Court acknowledged that part of the reason for the high rejection rate is that this is a new process as well for their 150 clerks and that further training is needed. The Court also let us know that they are internally reviewing the most common rejection reasons, rejections that don’t seem to make sense, and the practices being followed by the clerks.
The rate/cause of rejections, processing turnaround times, and pending/aging intervals are as follows based upon ACS/LASC performance statistics:

eFiling Rejection Rate: The overall case rejection rate since eFiling was first launched by LASC in November was 28%. However, over the past few weeks this rate has been greatly reduced.

Here are some of the top reasons for rejections that you may want to share with your customers:

Data entry error by filer – 40%
*Incorrect or abbreviated Party information
*Wrong Court Location selected
*Wrong document type Filing Code selected
*Attorney Information incorrect
Document uploaded is corrupted – 35%
*Missing or incorrect information
*Run-on document
*Missing signature(s)
*Party Names on document not a CMS match
Ineligible for Filing – 10%
*Other documents must be filed first
*Case has been dismissed

*LASC Processing Turnaround Times:
-70% of transactions have been processed by the Court within 1 week
-86% of transactions have been processed by the Court within 2 weeks
-14% of transactions took 2 weeks or longer for the Court to process

*Pending/Aging Intervals:
-65% of pending transactions have been with the Court for a week or less
-19% of pending transactions have been with the Court between 1 and 2 weeks
-16% of pending transactions have been with the Court for greater than 2 weeks

In the coming weeks and months, you should expect continued performance level improvements on all fronts.

For additional information or a case specific question, please call our Customer Support team at 888.514.5067 or send an email to efile@attorneyscertified.com.

For more information from the court, please click here to access the courts website.

Increasing operating efficiency for your business is our top priority. Thank you for allowing us to serve you.

-The ACS Team

PRESS RELEASE
Superior Court of California, County of Kern

October 5, 2017
TERRY McNALLY, PIO 661-868-4934

SUPERIOR COURT SELECTS ASSISTANT PRESIDING JUDGE
The Honorable Charles R. Brehmer, Presiding Judge, announced the unanimous selection of Judge Judith K. Dulcich as the next Assistant Presiding Judge of the Superior Court of California, County of Kern. Judge Dulcich will assume her new duties on January 1, 2018 and succeeds Judge John S. Somers, current Assistant Presiding Judge, who has completed a four year leadership term as Assistant Presiding and Presiding Judge of the Superior Court.

“Judge Dulcich is a proven leader at our Court” said Presiding Judge Brehmer. “She has a unique combination of experience in both our Regional and Metro Court locations that will help her as she takes on the leadership responsibilities for our court in the future.” Judge Brehmer also thanked Judge Somers for his leadership of the Court and steady hand over the past four years.
Judge Dulcich was appointed to the Superior Court in 2007. Her assignments at the Court include Family Law, Criminal Misdemeanor and Felony and Supervising Judge of the North Kern branch of the Superior Court. Prior to her appointment, Judge Dulcich served with the Office of the Kern County District Attorney from 1990 to October 2007. In addition to being a Supervising Deputy District Attorney, Judge Dulcich had experience litigating murder, sex assault, child molestation and other significant felony and misdemeanor cases as a District Attorney.

Judge Dulcich is a graduate from the University of San Diego Law School, May 1990, and obtained her Bachelor of Arts from San Diego State University in May 1987.
For questions concerning this press release use: WMadmin@kern.courts.ca.gov

Official Press Release, “Click Here”

July 2017 – Notice to Attorneys

LOS ANGELES COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT

SOME ONLINE SERVICES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE JULY 29 THROUGH JULY 31

Due to a major system upgrade, the following limited civil jurisdiction online services will be unavailable from 5:00 a.m. Saturday, July 29, through 5:00 p.m. Monday, July 31, 2017:

• Limited Civil Court Reservation System (CRS)
• Limited Civil Case Summary
• Limited Civil Party Name Search
• Limited Civil Case Calendar

No interruption of other website services is anticipated.

The new Limited Civil case management system is scheduled to go live on July 31, 2017. The Los Angeles Superior Court thanks you for your patience as we transition to a new case management system for limited jurisdiction civil cases. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Click here to see official notice – LASC 7-20-17

###

NOTICE TO ATTORNEYS

Los Angeles Superior Court – Public Information Office 111 N. Hill Street, Room 107, Los Angeles, CA 90012 publicinfo@lacourt.org www.lacourt.org

Thank you and have a wonderful week!

ACS email Service Interrupted – Nationwide Cyber Attacks

At approximately 8:30am PST, Attorney’s Certified Services began to experience intermittent issues sending and receiving emails. Our IT department began to research the problem and found news reports that the nation was under cyber attack. As of 2:00pm PST, the issues were resolved and email services were restored to our offices. We are asking clients who sent emails to us during this time, to confirm they were received.

MSN.com reported: SAN FRANCISCO — Multiple waves of online attacks blocked many major websites Friday, at times making it impossible for users on the East Coast to access Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit and other sites. The attacks used Mirai, an easy-to-use program that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks. Malware from phishing emails can infect a computer or home network, then spread to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance. The source code for Mirai was released on the so-called dark web at the beginning of the month. Those are sites that require specific software or authorization to access and that operate as a sort of online underground for hackers. The release led some security experts to suggest it would soon be widely used by hackers. That appears to have happened in this case. The Mirai botnet harnesses the computing power of Internet connected devices as the engine behind its denial of service attacks. These devices then flood a particular site or service with large amounts of fake traffic, overwhelming the system and making it impossible for legitimate messages to get through.

Effects felt nationwide

The first attacks appear to have begun around 7:10 a.m. Friday, then resolved towards 9:30 a.m.. Then waves began. “It’s been a hectic day,” said York. Dyn  posted on its website that it “began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure.” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the Department of Homeland Security was “monitoring the situation” but that “at this point I don’t have any information about who may be responsible for this malicious activity.”

Who and why unknown

So far Dyn has not been able to ascertain whether the attack is aimed at any specific customer. “We have no reason to believe it is at this point,” said Dave Allen, the company’s general counsel. The attack is “consistent with record-setting sized cyberattacks seen in the last few weeks,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security at security company Radware.

Disruption

A post on Hacker News first identified the attack and named the sites that were affected. Several sites, including Spotify and GitHub, took to Twitter this morning to post status updates once the social network was back online. Twitter users similarly took to the service to keep lists of which sites were down and comment on the situation. The term DDoS quickly vaulted to among the top of the site’s list of “Trending Topics” in the United States. “DDoS attack this morning takes out Reddit, Twitter & Spotify,” wrote user @Anubis8. “Work productivity increases by 300%.” “Anyone else having a whole lot of trouble with sites loading properly this morning?,” tweeted Emmy Caitlin. “Paypal is down, Twitter was down, Netflix half loading.”

How the attack works

As part of its business, Dyn provides DNS services for a given swath of the Internet, effectively its address book. DNS stands for Domain Name System, the decentralized network of files that list the domain names human beings use, such as usatoday.com, with their numeric Internet Protocol addresses, such as 184.50.238.11, which is how computers look for websites. “If you go to a site, say yahoo.com, your browser needs to know what the underlying Internet address that’s associated with that URL is. DNS is the service that does that conversion,”  said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer for Intel Security. The attack hit the Dyn server that contains that address book. Dyn provides that service to multiple Internet companies. For anyone linked to a computer that used the service, when they entered twitter.com or tumblr.com or Spotify.com, via a complex series of jumps the address book is able to tell their browser which numerical IP address to look at. The DDoS attack floods that server with illegitimate requests, so many that very few real requests can get through. The user gets a message that the server is not available. Service is intermittent because a few requests are sometimes still able to go through. In addition, many sites keep cached address books their computers can refer to. However those caches always have a time limit on them and when that “time to live” expires, they must go back to the DNS server to confirm the IP address is valid. If the DNS server is unavailable, a site that was working could suddenly stop being available, said Grobman.

To view the full article, click here!

Follow Eli Blumenthal on Twitter @eliblumenthal

Elizabeth Weise covers technology and cybersecurity for USA TODAY. Follow her at@eweise.

Kern County Superior Court – Proposed Local Rules of Court, September 15, 2016

The proposed amendments to the Superior Court of California, County of Kern, Local Rules of Court for January 1, 2017 are provided for review at: www.kern.court.ca.gov

1. Rule 1.7.5       Metropolitan Division Venues
2. Rule 1.9          Facsimile Filing
3. Rule 1.10        Electronic Filing
4. Rule 6.1          Propria Persona Filings – Pleading Prepared by Third Party
5. Rule 6.1.1       Forms of Documents Presented for Filing
6. Rule 6.1.2       Obtaining a Hearing Date
7. Rule 6.18        Elisor Signatures by Clerk of the Court
8. Rule 8.12        Forms of Documents Presented for Filing

You may submit your comments by email to: wmadmin@kern.court.ca.gov or mail your comments to:

Terry McNally, CEO
Superior Court of California
County of Kern
1415 Truxtun Avenue
Bakersfield, CA 93301

All comments must be received by 5:00pm Tuesday, November 1, 2016

To see the official notice and the proposed rule changes in their entirity, please click here.

Riverside County Superior Court eFiling News Update

The Superior Court of California, County of Riverside has announced that they will stop the current electronic filing project and will no longer process eFilings after Friday, December 4.  Any filings submitted through Friday will be processed as normal.  Riverside is evaluating RFP responses for a new case management system and plans to resume the rollout of electronic filing during the implementation of the new system.

Attorney’s Certified Services will keep you updated on the new eFiling system as the information is made available to us. In the meantime, Attorney’s Certified Services is able to complete all filings to Riverside County Courts via email or fax. Just e-mail your assignments to orders@attorneyscertified.com and we’ll take care of the rest.

We want to thank everyone that participated in the pilot program in Riverside and look forward to working with you in the future.  Please note, that this does not affect eFiling operations in Orange County or San Francisco County Superior Courts. To eFile in Orange County or San Francisco County Superior Courts, please click here!

Did You Know? Attorney’s Certified Services offers Legal Photocopy, On-Site Document Reproduction, Skip Tracing – People Locates, Writ Services including Bank Levy’s and Wage Garnishments? Give us a call at (888) 514-5067 to place your order.