Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal Announces Electronic Portal

Click here to login or register for eDCA

Introduction

In an effort to better serve those who have official business with the Court, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has developed an electronic portal for use by attorneys and the public to access and provide documents regarding cases. This web-based application is called eDCA and it will be available as a link through the 4thDCA website (www.4dca.org) as well as directly at http://eDCA.4dca.org.

The eDCA application is now publicly available and required for certain filings.

Use of the application will require minimal changes in the way attorneys and parties conduct business with the court. These changes are outlined as follows:

• Attorneys must submit briefs and petitions through the eDCA web application rather than through an e-mail to the court as they have done in the past.
• Attorneys must submit briefs and petitions not in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect format but in the more universally accepted and secure Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF.)
• Attorneys must submit, in addition to their briefs and petitions, any appendices. These appendices must also be submitted in the PDF format.

  In addition to providing a convenient portal for the transmission of briefs, petitions and appendices and additional document types as listed here, the eDCA application will allow users:

• Convenient access to any public, digitized document (as available) in cases where you are listed as an attorney of record.
• Ability to be served with court documents electronically in a method that is more timely than postal delivery of documents.

  How-to Guides for the use of eDCA

  In order to allay any concerns about the use of the new portal, the Court has prepared a number of How-to guides referencing various new procedures. Please read through these guides to get a better grasp of how eDCA might affect your workflow.
  Guide Index: (click a title)

  eDCA Primer
  Creating a PDF with the Adobe Acrobat Software
  Creating a PDF with Microsoft Word 2007
  Creating a PDF with WordPerfect
  Creating a PDF from Additional Programs
  Creating a PDF from a Paper Document
  Expanded E-Filing Guide with document