Yesterday marked the beginning of a new era for those who file civil cases in the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.). Considering its status as one of the nation’s oldest, most prestigious Districts Courts, with a corresponding docket full of high-profile civil (and criminal) cases, the change from “paper filing” to electronic filing is an important one. The announcement that the District would be going to electronic filing was in itself a bit surprising, considering that the clerk’s office and judges had resisted the temptation for many years. But change is constant, and starting yesterday, filing civil cases in the S.D.N.Y. will be done electronically in the vast majority of cases.
Since we opened our doors in December 2013, we have filed over twenty patent cases in the Southern District of New York. Every single one, including the four we filed last Friday, was filed at the clerk’s window on the ground floor of the modern and majestic Moynihan Courthouse. Between ourselves and our associate, we had the act of paper filing in the S.D.N.Y. down pat, making sure we were prepared each time with the requisite number of civil cover sheets, summonses, and complaints. Because some of the patents we filed cases on were quite lengthy (and are traditionally attached to patent complaints as exhibits), some of our filings required printing off a fair amount of paper. From that perspective, the switch to electronic filing will be more convenient for us.
This past Friday’s flurry of cases filed was partially the result of numerous clients authorizing us to file at the same time, and a desire to get those cases filed under the familiar paper filing system. I have no doubt that we will be filing more cases in the coming months, and that the transition to electronic filing will ultimately be more efficient for us. In fact, under the “old” system, filed documents needed to be scanned in and emailed to the clerk’s office for docketing on the ECF system. Going forward, we should be able to just scan in the documents ahead of time, and file at our convenience directly via ECF — saving a trip to the courthouse, and the need to scan the documents in for emailing after filing anyway.
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For a small firm like ours, the elimination of the need to physically go to the courthouse is a welcome one. I am always happy to go to court for a hearing, but making special trips just to file cases did at times feel like a waste of time. When possible, we would often try to file multiple complaints on one visit, which we were able to do on a number of occasions — especially since we use our firm credit card to pay the filing fee for cases, which meant that one of the partners needed to join our associate for the filings.
Despite the anticipated convenience of the new electronic filing procedure, however, part of me is going to miss “paper filing” of new cases — for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly because filing cases has become a linchpin of our practice. While we still do work on the defense side for legacy Biglaw clients, an important part of our firm’s business revolves around working on behalf of inventors and companies that need help monetizing their intellectual property. For those clients, especially in today’s patent litigation climate, the shortest road towards getting an audience with a potential licensor involves a stop at the courthouse to file a case alleging patent infringement. Absent the immediate threat of litigation, most licensing targets will simply ignore all invitations to sit down for negotiations. So we need to file cases on behalf of our clients. Doing so via “paper filing” helped serve as a reminder, to me at least, that as much as law is a profession, in many ways it is also a trade. And filing a civil case by hand was a tangible manifestation of the trade aspect of legal practice for me, representing the culmination of a long period of due diligence and preparation by our firm to get to the point where I would be standing at the clerk’s window, documents in hand.
At the same time, filing by hand was also a reminder of how far myself and my partners had come from our former lives in Biglaw. For one, the first time I ever actually filed a case myself was once we started our new firm. As a Biglaw patent litigator, the majority of my prior cases were on the defense side, and when we actually needed to file a case, there were two specialists within the New York office who handled all paper filings in the S.D.N.Y. They could also handle filings in other jurisdictions, though we often used local counsel, whether from our firm or another firm, to make sure that those cases were filed properly. Yes, it was nice to have dedicated resources to make sure that things were done right. But there was also a disconnect between the work we did in actually preparing a case, and seeing the clerk stamp the case with the case number and the name of the judge assigned by the computerized “wheel” to our filing.
Ultimately, there was something rewarding about making the trip to the courthouse to file a case in person. At the same time, technology is a great leveler, and even more importantly, the quality of the cases we file and the clients we represent are of an equivalent standard to the work we did while in Biglaw. We are grateful for the trust that our clients have placed in our legal skills, and we recognize that filing a case often opens a new chapter in the story of a client’s business. Whether we file by hand or electronically, our biggest concern is helping to write a happy ending to each of those stories.
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Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique. The firm’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.