Effective July 1, 2016, all documents filed with the district court by attorneys and government agencies must be eFiled; please see the
News Item posted on the Judicial Branch website for more information. In addition to the required electronic filing of citations and complaints, which is supported by the
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s (BCA) eCharging service, all non-charging documents required to be filed with the court must also be eFiled, which is done through the
Judicial Branch’s eFiling and eService system, known as eFS. Recognized exceptions to the eFiling requirement include juvenile delinquency charging documents, charging documents filed by agencies without a federal ORI that cannot use the BCA service, and indictments when no criminal case exists in the MN Court Information System; all of those documents must be filed on paper until an electronic filing solution is identified. Please refer to the
Mandatory Electronic Filing and Service Overview for more detailed information and an explanation of eFiling requirements and exceptions.
Please note that if upon motion to the court, an exception to an eFS eFiling requirement is granted in a particular case, a $25 scanning fee for each 50 pages of the filing will be charged to the filer. Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(b)(3).
Please also note that for every filing, whether through eFS or the BCA service, information regarding minor victims of certain sex crimes (Minn. R. Pub. Access 4, subd. 1(m)(1), (2)) and restricted identifiers (Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 11.01, 11.02) must be filed on a separate confidential document when necessary.
Questions have been raised recently about the eFiling requirements for search warrants. It is important to note that search warrants are only required to be filed with court administration “after execution of the search or the expiration of 10 days.” Minn. R. Crim. P. 33.04(b). When an agency is requesting a search warrant from a judge, that process does not require filing with court administration and instead involves direct contact with the judge either in person, by telephone, or through electronic means such as email.
When a search warrant does need to be filed with court administration, the documents must be eFiled into an administrative file. District courts will periodically create three separate search warrant administrative files: a public file for executed adult criminal search warrants; a confidential file for search warrants with a juvenile subject (Minn. R. Juv. Del. P. 4.01); and a sealed file for warrants issued under chapter 626A that are required to be maintained under seal. An agency that needs to file a search warrant will need to get the public, confidential, and/or sealed administrative file number(s) from the local district court before eFiling. The follow guidelines should be followed when eFiling search warrants: