Timing

            All motions must be filed no later than the third business day (excludes federal holidays and weekends) before the day the motion is to be heard. For examples, absent a holiday, (1) a motion filed on a Monday may be noticed for the upcoming Thursday; and (2) a motion filed on a Thursday may be noticed for the following Tuesday. For civil cases and non-custodial criminal cases, the motion schedule is Monday through Thursday at 8:30 a.m. For in-custody defendants in criminal cases (and if the motion requires the defendant’s presence), the motion schedule is Monday through Thursday at 9 a.m.

            The exception to the 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. hearing times is as follows: if there is an already-scheduled status hearing at a different time, then the motion may be noticed for that already-scheduled time. This applies only to the time of the hearing; all other in-advance requirements must be met.

If you are a pro se litigant using the Pro Se Filer online portal to submit a filing, then you must take into account the three-business days that it might take for the Clerk’s Office to process and to upload your filing. In other words, if you submit a motion through the online portal then you must add another three business days to the already-required three-business days’ notice. Likewise, if the Court set a filing deadline, then you must submit the filing three business days earlier to account for the processing. The Court sets longer deadlines for pro se litigants to account for the lack of counsel and general lack of access to direct filing on the docket. 

 Courtesy copies

Generally, the Court does not accept paper courtesy copies. Please do not prepare them and do not try to deliver them. If you think that a paper courtesy copy would be truly, truly invaluable, then please email (copying the other side) the courtroom deputy for guidance. Having said that, for sealed filings posted on CM/ECF, you must provide a digital courtesy copy via Box.com. Please see the standing order on Digital Courtesy Copies of Sealed Filings on Judge Chang’s website.

Electronic filing / OCR searchable text

            With regard to CM/ECF filing, for any word-processed filing (e.g., briefs and memoranda), counsel shall convert the document into a .pdf document by printing or publishing to .pdf, rather than manually scanning a paper copy into .pdf, in order to generate searchable optical character recognition (OCR) text. For any filing of any kind (including exhibits in support of a motion or any Local Rule 56.1 Statement), counsel must run an OCR conversion on it before uploading it onto CM/ECF. To do this in Adobe, go to Tools, Text Recognition, In This File, and select All Pages. If you see the message, “Acrobat could not perform recognition (OCR) on this page because this page contains renderable text,” click “Ignore future errors in this document,” and click OK.

Other requirements (including conferral)

    Before filing a motion, the movant’s counsel (or the movant, if pro se) must ask opposing counsel (or the opposing party, if pro se) whether there is an objection to the motion, and the motion must state that the conferral occurred, or if not, why not. If there is an objection, the movant must note that fact on the first page of the motion and of any separate brief in support. Joint, uncontested, and agreed motions must be so identified in both the title and the body of the motion. Trial dates and discovery deadlines generally will not be reset except by written motion.

            In addition to the 15-page limit on briefs, Local Rule 7.1, the Court applies the other format requirements of Local Rule 5.2(c) to electronically filed briefs. See Local Rule 5.2(c) for those page-size, font-size, margin, and spacing requirements. Counsel shall not respond to motions by correspondence with the Court.