Response and comment to may article on rules of judicial administration.

• Author: Regensdorf, Paul
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

Mr. Lampert published an article in the May Journal addressing concerns about Rules 2.420 and 2.425 of the Rules of Judicial Administration. The article shows that every lawyer needs to spend more time working with these important rules, but it also shows that the rules really are not well-enough understood, even by some who really try to dig into them. The "solution" is two-fold: Those who wrote these rules [and I am one] need to review them to see if they can be made more clear; and the Bar must devote additional resources to create educational programs for lawyers on how they should protect confidential and sensitive information so that only appropriate information gets into court files. And once confidential information gets placed in the file, it must be correctly protected from public viewing by notices to the clerks or motions to the judges.

Keith Park's letter on this issue, with which I agree, identifies some of the difficulties in Mr. Lampert's article. But the largest is the fact that Mr. Lampert, and too many lawyers, fail to recognize the reason for these two rules and why compliance with their sometimes complex but comprehendible concepts is critical in our electronic age.

Since early in the last decade, the Supreme Court has been pushing an antiquated court system toward an electronic courthouse where paper documents are largely banished, and the public's court records are available to them in an electronic format. But before that could happen, two difficult things had to occur. First, a process had to be created to sort out confidential information from that which could be publicly accessible. This required lawyers and other filers to learn what was confidential and what was not, and required rules committees to come up with a way to get all needed documents into a court file and sorted into those available for public viewing and those with more limited access. The present Rule 2.420 was that vehicle, and lawyers must learn how to comply with its complex provisions if the Supreme Court's long-desired goal of a functioning electronic court can be achieved.

But there was a second concern, and it was a lazy habit lawyers had of putting a great deal of "sensitive" personal information into court files when there was no good reason for it to be there. Rule 2.425 addressed this problem. This rule has no major clerk or court role. The monkey is almost exclusively on the lawyer's back to delete or redact--or not include in the first...