The United States District Court for the District of Maryland has recently issued two Standing Orders and revised certain CM/ECF filing procedures that will soon begin to impact litigants in this Court.
As described in the September 28, 2018 Notice, the Court has adopted a three-year pilot project to randomly assign a limited number of certain civil cases directly to the Magistrate Judges of this Court for all proceedings and the entry of a final judgment, subject to the consent of all parties. This pilot project took effect on Thursday, November 1, 2018. Please review Standing Order 2018-04 for more information.
The Court has also adopted Standing Order 2018-05 allowing for non-prisoner, self-represented litigants to request to receive notice and service of electronic filings via email transmission. Such notice shall constitute service for all items required to be served under Fed. R. Civ. P. 5(a) and 77(d), and the Court shall no longer send paper copies of orders by mail to any consenting litigant. Self-represented litigants electing to receive electronic notice must still continue to file all documents by hand delivery to the Clerk’s Office or by first class mail, and must serve opposing parties by first class mail. Self-represented litigants may begin enrolling in this program on or about November 15, 2018.
Finally, the Court has approved a new policy on the filing of lengthy documents. Previously, documents that exceeded CM/ECF’s size limitation of 30 megabytes were required to be filed in paper with the Clerk’s Office and a notice of filing of lengthy document was electronically filed on the docket. Now, documents exceeding the system’s size capacity must be filed electronically. These large documents should be subdivided, appropriately identified, and filed separately (e.g., Exhibit A, Part 1; Exhibit A, Part 2, etc.). This change does not impact or modify the continuing requirement of providing courtesy copies for the presiding judge when the number of pages for the main document plus attachments totals 15 pages or more. Additional information on electronic case filing policies and procedures is available on the Court’s website.