Court e-filing receipts compared

United States: CM/ECF and the Notice of Electronic Filing

CM/ECF is the federal judiciary's case management and electronic case files system ¹. Filing in it needs a PACER account and special access issued by each court ¹.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5 says a person represented by an attorney must file electronically, with exceptions allowed for good cause or by local rule, and that a paper filed electronically is a written paper for the purposes of the rules ². Service can be made by filing with the court's electronic-filing system on a registered user ². Service is complete on filing, but is not effective if the filer learns it did not reach the person to be served ².

Local rules fill in the detail. In the Southern District of Indiana, Local Rule 5-4 says the notice of electronic filing serves as the court's datestamp and proof of filing ³. Sending that notice to an attorney's email address counts as service on that attorney ³. A document due on a given day must be filed before midnight local time of the division where the case is pending ³. A filed document is deemed entered on the clerk's docket ³.

England and Wales: CE-File

Practice Direction 51O ran the Electronic Working pilot from 16 November 2015 ⁴. It said Electronic Working lets parties file documents online 24 hours a day, every day, subject to downtime and some exceptions ⁴. The 186th update to the Civil Procedure Rules omitted Practice Direction 51O and inserted Practice Direction 5C, CE-File Electronic Filing and Case Management System, from 1 October 2025 ⁵.

Under Practice Direction 5C, submitting a document generates an automated submission confirmation ⁵. Court officers then either accept or reject the submission ⁵. For a fee-bearing document, the date and time of filing is when the fee is paid ⁵. For other submissions it is the date and time of submission stated on the submission confirmation ⁵.

If a submission is rejected, the party gets notice of the reasons on CE-File ⁵. A rejected claim form or other document that needs issue is not issued, and any resubmission takes its own filing date and time ⁵.

Australia: eLodgment and the Notice of Filing

The Federal Court of Australia runs eLodgment for registered users ⁶. Once documents are accepted for filing, users can download sealed electronic versions to email or print for service ⁶. Sealed documents can be downloaded from the Commonwealth Courts Portal after a short delay ⁶.

Under rule 2.24 of the Federal Court Rules, a Notice of Filing page becomes the first page of an electronically lodged document ⁷. It records when the document was lodged and states that it has been accepted for filing under the Court's Rules ⁷. The Court says the lodgment date is not necessarily the acceptance date, and that the filing date does not appear on the Notice of Filing page ⁷. The filing date appears below the Court's seal and is worked out under rule 2.25 ⁷.

Side by side

Getting copies

In US federal courts, PACER charges $0.10 per page with a cap of $3 per document, and court opinions are free ⁸. A party who receives a Notice of Electronic Filing gets one free copy of the document ⁸. Fees are waived for users who spend $30 or less in a quarter ⁸.