Many of you have experienced getting your “Same Day” filings drop-boxed at LASC-Central.  This has been occurring more regularly this year than ever before.  Please understand this is an action directed by the court itself and requires all attorney services in line to drop-box all filings.  This directive always comes unannounced and at random times between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m.  The reason the court is doing this is to minimize overtime accrued by their staff.  The determination to require drop-boxing is made by the volume of people in line, the time of day and the amount of clerks processing at the windows, which are usually (2) two during this timeframe.  All filings are deemed filed that day, however conformed copies can take up to 3 days to be returned by the court.

Please note, when this occurs all documents must be prepared and organized by our staff with the appropriate fee checks attached, buck slips, envelopes for returns and any instructions if necessary.  Unfortunately during this process there isn’t sufficient time to call all clients and inform them until after this process is complete.

As one of the many attorney service vendors that file documents for its clients at LASC-Central, we ask for your patience and understanding as we are working with the court to improve this situation.  In the meantime, we ask you to include the following instructions when filing at LASC-Central:

• If there are documents you would under no circumstances want to be drop-boxed, please include this in your instructions when sending your request.  If the court asks us to drop-box our filings, we will hold it and file it the next morning with the next day’s date.

• If a courtesy copy is required to go to a department that same day, please request a non-conformed copy to be delivered before drop-boxing your document.  Otherwise, a conformed copy will be delivered to that department when the processed documents are retrieved.

We thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding. If you have any additional questions please email us at clientcare@firstlegal.com.