Electronic Filing in New York State Courts

The Division of E-Filing of the New York State Office of Court Administration has made extensive training materials available on its site. See: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/HomePage

The site includes a training system that you can register to use by emailing an application to analysts who work for the Division of E-Filing.

Today, I participated in a two-hour training session on NYSCEF e-filing hosted by the Office of Court Administration. Here's a rundown of some of the more notable aspects of the system.

Electronic filing is available for the New York State Supreme Court, Civil Court, Court of Claims, Surrogate's Court, and the Appellate Divisions.

The system gives you the option to both make new filings for an existing case, and to initiate a new case.

E-filing can be performed using Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari with Windows, but oddly only with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but NOT Edge using a Mac. It's possible to e-file on an iPhone or Android device using Chrome and Firefox, but Safari will only work for iOS.

All PDFs must be in the PDF/A format and be text searchable. None can be more than 100 MB. Documents should have a 1-inch margin and a resolution of 200 dpi. Requirements for PDFs filed with NYSCEF are posted here. These also specify that PDFs be flattened, if they are multi-layered. As discussed in the Tip of the Night for September 9, 2024, courts have different definitions for what constitutes flattening a PDF. This is the first place I can recall a court instructing filers to check for layers in a PDF. You can check to see if a PDF has layers by clicking on the three stacked square icon next to the thumbnails and bookmarks in the left toolbar in Acrobat.

PDFs cannot include attachments (click the paperclip icon in the left toolbar for files embedded in a PDF), and "commenting/reviewing features (highlighting, annotations, comments, notes, and the like) are prohibited.". The instructions also state that long filenames will not upload properly, but don't specify a character limit. Further, they state that PDFs that "contain open action tags or javascript" will not be accepted. You can check for tags in the left toolbar here:

The Javascripts tool will reveal any which are in the PDF:

Note that at the end of the electronic filing process, the filer will need to acknowledge that PDFs have been scanned for viruses and that any which have been located are removed, and that he or she has "not included any content that cannot render (be viewed) directly or completely to a printed page."

When filing a new complaint in a Supreme Court first select the County, and then enter a case type:

E-filing became available for case types for which it had previously been excluded pursuant to an order of the Chief Administrative Judge in July 2025.

The e-filer next enters the names of the plaintiffs and defendants in the action. The name of an individual and that of a company should not be placed on the same line.

The system then prompts you to confirm that the entered information will match the caption of the documents you are filing:

In the next step, the system prompts you to confirm that your PDFs are indeed ready for filing. See the link for 'Check your PDF documents now.'

Upload each of your PDFs to the PDF Checker page.

. . . and it will indicate if each of your PDFs is ready to be filed.

Note that at this stage when filing a 'commencement document', the system will ask if you are filing a Request for Judicial Intervention, which is a form required to make a request for a judge to be assigned to the matter.

Each PDF is uploaded individually. The user must enter a document type and indicate if the document contains 'CPI' - or 'confidential personal information', and if that information has been redacted.

The system will remind the e-filer that an entry must be made in the short description field for each exhibit included with a filing.

The next step is to enter credit card information so the filing fee can be paid.

At the last step an attorney file number must be entered for each of the parties to the filing, and the filer must acknowledge that CPI has been redacted, and as noted above, that the PDFs are free of viruses and do not include any attachments which cannot be printed out, such as a video file or CAD drawing.

The filer will be given the option to get eTrack alerts (a free service which sends an email to participants each time the court sets an appearance). It is also possible to download a 'NYSCEF Confirmation Notice' for the electronic filing.

Note that for counties in which electronic filing is not available for the state supreme court, it is possible to use the Electronic Document Delivery System (EDDS) to submit documents to the court electronically. If EDDS is used, the filing party must also separately email or fax other parties and include a Proof of Service in their filing with the court. See the EDDS site here: https://iappscontent.courts.state.ny.us/NYSCEF/live/edds.htm

In most large counties in New York State (including those for Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City) in civil cases before the state supreme court documents cannot be submitted via EDDS.

NYSCEF allows filers to not only receive filing notices at their primary email address, but also at two additional email addresses.

It is noted here that a document will be considered signed by the e-filer under whose account it is electronically filed. If someone else electronically files the document, then the person who has signed must have signed a hard copy scanned as a PDF, or "document may also be signed when the signatory affixes the digital image of his or her signature to the document."

Low Bit Rate HDMI cables

If you're using a gaming laptop for a trial presentation, or simply tasked with setting up a monitor capable of 4K or 8K resolution (ultra high definition using 4,000 or 8,000 pixels) you want to keep in mind that an older or even 'high speed' HDMI cable may not be able to support the video at such an elevated resolution.

Standard HDMI cables are no longer widely available at Best Buy or other online stores where you're likely to go to pick one up, but there's no doubt that you may be handed one by a law firm's IT staff, or find one as the cable provided for a courtroom's a/v system. These cables have a bandwidth of 4.95 Gbps and won't be able to support 4K or higher. They are designed for 1080 pixel devices. They will be designated as version 1.0 or 1.2.

You might think that a 'high speed' cable [versions 1.3 to 1.4] would be what you need, but it also won't work with 4K video at higher frames per second. They support 10.2 Gbps but won't support 4K video higher than 30 frames per second.

A Premium High Speed version 2.0 HDMI cable has a bandwidth of 18 Gbps and will work with any 4K video, and some 8K videos at lower frame rates.

If you want to play it safe and be ready for any 8K video at all, secure an Ultra High Speed HDMI version 2.1 cable (48 Gbps).

The Ultra High Speed cable will work fine with lower res videos.

If you are using an HDMI cable that won't support the resolution of the video, you may simply get a lower res video, a video that flickers, or worse yet no signal at all.

AI's Token Limit

Those of us trying to keep up with the increasing use of AI systems for legal work, have probably heard at some point that the Large Language Models which are the basis for ChatGPT and other AI tools, will give poorer results as more and more text is used to train the model. A 2024 article posted by the Databricks data analysis company, which is valued at $62 billion, (Quinn Leng, et al., Long Context RAG Performance of LLMs (Aug. 12, 2024), https://www.databricks.com/blog/long-context-rag-performance-llms ) found OpenAI's "GPT-4-0125-preview starts to decrease after 64k tokens, and only a few models can maintain consistent long context RAG performance on all datasets." RAG stands for retrieval augmented generation - it's basically the use of external documents for AI LLM systems.

This chart from the article shows how likely different AI models are to generate a correct answer when they use somewhere between 2K to 125K tokens.

But what's a token? In the context of AI a token is a string of characters that an AI system will use to detect relationships with other text strings broken into tokens. There can be more tokens than words in a block of text. Open AI's online Tokenizer will calculate the number of tokens in any text block you enter:

The token count can add up rapidly. The site, https://token-calculator.net/ generates 288185 tokens for the full text of Moby Dick.

As this example shows, not all words are classified as one token:

So if a study indicates there will be a performance decline after 64,000 tokens, keep in mind the poor performance that may result when working with document productions of several million documents.