The Canadian Supreme Court advises that, excluding correspondence filed with the Registry, “all documents filed in proceedings must be filed in electronic format with print (paper) documents filed for the Court record.”

Guidelines for electronic submissions cover technical requirements, bookmarks, hyperlinks, volumes, and signatures. Scroll down to learn more.

Technical requirements

Electronic court bundles filed with the Canadian Supreme Court need to be meet the following technical requirements:

• Bundles must be submitted as PDFs
• Documents included within a court bundle need to be searchable, and any scanned documents must have OCR processing applied
• Resolution should be set to 300 dpi, and scanned documents should not be set to greyscale
• The bundle must be scanned for viruses and malware before filing
• The file size needs to be at or under 75 megabytes

Bookmarks

Bookmarks within an electronic court bundle must:

• Mirror the items in the Table of Contents of both a document and of each volume of a document. In any book of authorities, the name of each authority must be preceded by the tab number.
• Where a printed version has a passage highlighted by underlining it or placing a vertical line in the margin, you must create a sub-bookmark for that passage.

Hyperlinks

If you need to include hyperlinks in your electronic court bundle, note that:

• Hyperlinking to websites or within a document is allowed.
• Hyperlinking between documents is not allowed, as these links will break once uploaded to the Court’s document management system.
  
  

Volumes

Where a printed version has more than one volume, the electronic court bundle must be saved in separate files that correspond to the printed volumes.

Signatures

Even though the electronic court bundle must be identical to the printed version, it does not need to contain a signature – either a scanned image of the signature from the printed document or an electronic signature.

Pre-filing checklist

The Canadian Supreme Court recommends you use the following as a checklist before you file your electronic court bundle to ensure it meets the requirements:

• Remove any security settings from the bundle.
• Remove hidden text, annotations and track changes from source documents before converting them to PDF.
• Ensure scanned documents are text searchable and that you apply OCR technology where needed.
• Enable the ‘commenting’ functionality for the PDF
• Use the underscore ‘_’ symbol as an element delimiter. Don’t include any of the following characters in the file name:

` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * () + = [] {} : ; '~ ,. ? | " /

These guidelines came into effect on January 27, 2021. They were issued under Rule 21 of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Canada and are also outlined here.

Creating a Canadian Supreme Court PDF binder template with the above requirements can help save you time and reduce the likelihood of forgetting a small but important detail. Watch how to make your next electronic court bundle from a template in pdfDocs Binder.

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