CM/ECF PDF Requirements for Scanned Federal Court Exhibits

ECF PDF requirements come in two layers. The CM/ECF software itself refuses certain files, such as a PDF that is encrypted, password-protected or carrying scripts or embedded attachments. Each federal court then adds its own terms on flattened forms, searchable text, scanning and file size. A scanned exhibit has to clear both before the clerk will leave it alone.

This post quotes the published procedures of several named courts to show what those layers look like. The courts are examples, and every one of their documents can change. It explains how to prepare a file and is not legal advice. Read your own court's current material before you file.

Where are a federal court's ECF PDF requirements written down?

A federal court's ECF PDF requirements are written down in several places at once: the court's local rules, its administrative procedures for electronic filing, the CM/ECF user manual, and notices and FAQ pages on the court's website. A judge's own procedures can add more. The documents point to one another, so read your court's set together.

The Northern District of Alabama page states why you cannot stop at one document: "Consult local guidelines regarding additional PDF and filing requirements. Some PDFs may be accepted by the system but then rejected by the court based on local requirements."

An order to read them in

1. The local civil rule on filing and format.
2. The administrative procedures or ECF rules. Note the revision date on the cover.
3. The user manual section on creating PDFs and attaching documents.
4. The court website's CM/ECF notices and FAQ.
5. Your judge's procedures or standing order.
6. Any order in your case that touches exhibits or sealing.

Bankruptcy courts and courts of appeals keep their own sets. If your matter moves between them, start again.

Text-searchable, flattened and unlocked: what CM/ECF expects of a PDF

CM/ECF expects a standards-compliant PDF with no encryption, no password, no scripts, no embedded attachments and no audio or video. Courts then add their own terms. Some prohibit unflattened fillable forms, and some require searchable text on everything, on main documents only, or not on scans at all.

What the system itself refuses

The District of Oregon's manual says that at the time of filing, CM/ECF "evaluates the document for compliance with PDF standards and will reject PDFs with the following content": JavaScript, encryption, password protection, "scripts that can launch an external application," internal attachments, and embedded audio or video. The Northern District of Alabama's page gives a matching list and puts it bluntly: "If you try to upload a PDF with prohibited content, it will be rejected."

The same Alabama page lists what the system accepts. Two entries matter for scanned exhibits. A PDF that "Contains optical character recognition (OCR) meta-data" is accepted, and so is one "Comprised of scanned documents," with a note that "Local courts may stipulate acceptable dots-per-inch (dpi) standards."

Open the exhibit before you upload it and confirm the text layer is present. For a filing in federal court, read the CM/ECF page and the court's own note as two lists. Save the receipt next to the PDF you sent. You can match a later docket entry to that same file.

So adding an OCR text layer does not, by itself, make CM/ECF refuse a file. Whether your court wants that layer is a separate question.

Unlocked

A scanned exhibit can pick up security settings without anyone intending it, for example from a scanner profile or from the person who sent it to you. Check the document properties of the final file. If you added the protection, export a fresh copy from your unprotected original. If someone else did, ask them for an unprotected copy. A restriction on a document you received may be there for a reason, such as a protective order, so ask before you do anything else with it.

Flattened

Flattening turns form fields and layered content into fixed page content. The District of Arizona's notice on flattening PDF fillable forms says "all PDF files must be 'flattened' before filing through CM/ECF" and quotes the message the system gives: "ERROR: Fillable forms must be flattened before attaching." Oregon's manual says "DO NOT upload a PDF fillable form to CM/ECF. Instead, print or flatten the fillable PDF before uploading it to CM/ECF so that the fields are removed."

The method these courts describe is printing to a PDF printer. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maryland's CM/ECF PDF requirements guide gives the same steps and calls flattening the "simplest way to address most PDF upload rejections."

One caution for scanned exhibits. Printing a searchable scan to a PDF printer makes a new file, and depending on the software the new file may or may not keep the text layer. After flattening, search for a word on the first and last page. If the text is gone, run OCR on the flattened file. Why printing and flattening can drop the text is explained in the post on the steps that stop a PDF being searchable.

Text-searchable

Which federal courts require searchable PDFs, and in what words, is surveyed in the section on whether courts require text-searchable PDFs. The courts read for this post add three more positions, and they do not agree.

Three courts, three different duties for the same scanned exhibit. Find your court's sentence before you decide how much OCR work a filing needs.

Why do ECF size limits differ from one district to the next?

ECF size limits differ because each federal court sets its own in its own procedures. Nothing in the documents read for this post explains why the figures differ.

The one stated reason for having a limit is practical. The District of Vermont's procedures say large documents "may not upload properly to the ECF system or download within a reasonable amount of time."

Each court name in the table links to the document the figure comes from. Other courts publish other numbers. Treat any figure you remember from a previous case as unverified until you have read it again on the court's site.

What a size limit means for scans

The Vermont procedures give a sense of scale. Converted text "can yield between 300 and 500 pages per 1 MB," while scanned documents "will yield considerably fewer pages (approximately 1/10th the number of pages depending on the scanner settings)." Color and graphics "may yield even fewer pages." A limit that a brief will never approach can be reached by one scanned exhibit.

The same procedures set scanner defaults: "300 dpi and black and white rather than color scanning, unless color scanning is necessary to preserve the integrity of the document being filed."

What courts say to do when a file is over

• Oregon: files over the limit "must be broken down into smaller, separate files and uploaded as attachments to the main document."
• Eastern District of Tennessee: documents over the limit "must be divided into separate documents less than 50 MB in size."
• Vermont: scanned PDFs over the limit may be submitted "only if the files are divided into multiple files of 50 MB or less each."

Finding your court's limit, rescanning to fit it and labeling the parts are covered in the guide to reducing PDF size for court filing.

One more limit sits upstream of the court's. If you use an online tool to add a text layer, it has an upload cap of its own. Schema Law accepts files up to 20 MB, which is under each court limit in the table, so a large scanned exhibit may need to be split before conversion and reassembled after.

Scanned signature pages and exhibits inside a native ECF filing

Keep the parts you wrote as PDFs made directly from the word processor, and scan only what must be a scan: a page with a handwritten signature your court requires, and exhibits that exist on paper. Then file them the way your court's procedures say, which in some courts means separate attachments.

The main document

The Eastern District of Tennessee's rules draw the line clearly. "Briefs and motions must be filed in PDF text format and not created by scanning. Whenever possible, other documents should also be in PDF text format." The rules define PDF text format as "a text-searchable PDF file generated from an original word-processing file." Printing a brief, signing it and scanning all of it breaks that rule.

Signatures

For the filer's own signature, Rule 5(d)(3)(C) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure says: "A filing made through a person's electronic-filing account and authorized by that person, together with that person's name on a signature block, constitutes the person's signature."

Other people's signatures are where scans come in, and courts handle them differently. The Tennessee rules show one approach:

• A declarant or affiant. "Documents requiring an original signature other than that of the E-Filer (e.g., affidavits and declarations) shall be filed by transmitting a scanned image of the document to the Electronic Filing System in PDF format."
• Several signers. The filer may "file a scanned image of the document containing all necessary signatures," or file it without them "with a representation by the E-Filer that all signatories have consented," or use another manner the court approves.

Your court's procedures may say something different about each. Read the signature section before you decide what to scan.

When a scanned signature page does go into a filing, a few habits keep it clean:

1. Scan only the signed page or pages, not the whole document, unless your court's wording requires the full scanned document.
2. Combine the scanned page with the directly converted pages in the right position.
3. Run OCR on the scanned page if your court requires searchable text throughout.
4. Compare the signature page with the paper original.

The Tennessee rules add a duty that applies to every scan: the filer "must verify that a scanned document is an accurate representation of the original document prior to filing it."

Exhibits

Three kinds of exhibit rule appear in the procedures read for this post.

Excerpts only. The Tennessee rules say filers "shall submit as exhibits or attachments only those excerpts of the referenced documents that are directly germane to the matter under consideration by the Court," and that "Excerpted material must be clearly and prominently identified as such." Vermont's procedures have a similar provision. Scanning twelve relevant pages is less work than scanning a two-hundred-page contract, and it produces a smaller file.

Separate attachments. The District Court of the Virgin Islands' list of common CM/ECF docketing errors says "Each attachment or exhibit to a motion or response shall be filed as a separate subdocument to the main documents that references the attachment or exhibit." Vermont's procedures add that if the number of attachments exceeds five, the filer includes "a separate index describing each exhibit" as the first attachment.

Legibility. Vermont's procedures make the filer "responsible for the legibility of the scanned document," and say that if a document "cannot be easily read after scanning, the filing party should not electronically file the document" and must file it conventionally with the clerk's office.

A worked example. In a fictional case, Abernathy v. Kessler Tool & Die, a paralegal is filing a motion with a client declaration and four exhibits. The motion and memorandum are saved to PDF from the word processor. The declaration is drafted the same way, the client signs the last page in ink, and that page is scanned and swapped in. Exhibits 1 and 2 are emails saved straight to PDF. Exhibits 3 and 4 are a paper purchase order and an inspection report, scanned at 300 dpi in black and white and run through OCR. Each exhibit is uploaded as its own attachment with a description, because that court's procedures ask for it.

What triggers a deficiency notice for an ECF attachment?

A problem with an ECF attachment surfaces in one of two ways. The CM/ECF system can refuse an upload on the spot because of what is inside the PDF. Or the upload goes through and the clerk's office reviews it afterwards and sends a notice.

Courts' published lists of common problems include legibility, missing pages, scanned documents, and attachments filed or described incorrectly.

Refused by the system

These are the content problems the system checks for: encryption, a password, scripts, embedded files or media, and in some courts an unflattened form. You see an error and nothing is filed. Oregon's manual points to a tool for checking in advance: "CM/ECF provides a utility that will scan a PDF to check for potential problems. It is located at Utilities/Check PDF Document." Look for the same menu item in your court's system.

Noticed by the clerk

The District of South Carolina describes its review in a document on its quality assurance process: "Case managers review filings within 24 hours of receipt. If there is a deficiency in the filing, the case manager notifies the filing user with a description of the deficiency and action, if any, required on the part of the filing user." Its chart of common errors includes these, under "Document" and "Filing Entry":

• "Attachments filed incorrectly"
• "Legibility"
• "Missing pages"
• "Scanned vs. converted"
• "Signature issues, e.g., signature missing, signature on document does not match log-in"
• "Attachments/Exhibits not properly described"

The Southern District of New York's ECF quality assurance FAQs list attachments and exhibits among the "most common misused events and errors." They say "Exhibits are not filed as individual events" and "If there is no signature or s/ the document will receive a deficiency error." They also warn about a time limit while attaching: if all your exhibits will not be attached before the system times out, "prepare the document in parts (i.e., Declaration of John Doe Part 1 of 3, Part 2 of 3, etc.)."

How each item maps to a scanned exhibit

If you get a notice

Read it and do what it says, and no more. Courts differ on the next step. The Eastern District of Tennessee's rules say the system "will not allow an E-Filer to correct a filing after it has been electronically submitted," that filers "shall report Filing Errors to the Clerk's Office," and that they "may be required to re-file the document or file a motion requesting relief." Vermont's procedures say the filing party "should not attempt to re-file the document as this will result in duplicative entries on the docket" and should contact the ECF Help Desk. South Carolina's document says "It is important to follow instructions provided in the email sent by the case manager."

Whether a notice affects a deadline is a legal question for the lawyer on the case, and it is a reason to file early enough to fix a problem.

An ECF attachment checklist for a paralegal filing scanned exhibits

Run the checklist on the final files, the ones you will actually upload, and fill in your own court's figures first. It moves in the order the work happens: confirm the court's terms, prepare each exhibit, check the file's properties, then check the docket entry.

Your court's terms (write the answers at the top)

Each scanned exhibit

• Is there an electronic original that could be converted directly, so no scan is needed?
• Scanned at the court's resolution, in black and white unless color carries meaning.
• Page count matches the paper.
• Every page is upright and readable at normal zoom.
• OCR added if the court requires or permits it. In Schema Law, upload the scan and export a searchable PDF. The how it works section of the homepage shows the steps.
• A word from the first page and a word from the last page can both be found by search.
• Personal identifiers are redacted in the image and absent from the text.
• Only the pages the motion relies on are included, if your court limits exhibits to excerpts.

The file's properties

• No password and no security restrictions listed in document properties.
• No form fields, comments, embedded files or media.
• Flattened if it began as a form, and searched again after flattening.
• Under the size limit, with room to spare.
• File name short and descriptive.
• Passes the system's PDF check utility, if your court's CM/ECF has one.

The docket entry

• Main document is a directly converted PDF with a signature block.
• Each exhibit is attached the way the court's procedures say, in order.
• Each attachment has a description that identifies it.
• An index of exhibits is the first attachment if your court requires one.
• After filing, open each document from the notice of electronic filing and confirm it is the right file and complete.

State systems run on different software and different rules. For a comparison from a state court, see the guide to NYSCEF PDF requirements.