Beware of appellate courts seeking to improve lawyers’ work-life balance. On Tuesday, Jan. 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit announced that it was seeking public comment on a proposed change to its local rules of appellate procedure that would move the current deadline for electronic filing from its current nationwide default of 11:59:59 p.m. to 5 p.m. eastern time. The proposed rule change caused an immediate uproar in the appellate legal community.

Although the rule change was bereft of any accompanying explanation, in June 2019 the Third Circuit’s current chief judge, Michael A. Chagares, while he was serving as chair of the Advisory Committee on the Appellate Rules, proposed that the electronic filing deadline in all federal appellate courts should be moved back from midnight to when the clerk’s office physically closed for business. That proposal resulted in some study of when electronic filings are actually occurring in the federal trial and appellate courts, but no nationwide rule change proposal for an earlier electronic filing deadline emerged.

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