How will I know (Don't trust your feelings)

Whitney Houston asked that in 1985. She was presciently focused, no doubt, on the future of workers’ compensation e-filing, which would come to Florida twenty years later. How will I know that my petition for benefits or other pleading was received? A great question, and the answer to this question is a fundamental element of the e-service paradigm that we are entering.
Discretion has decreased in recent years. E-filing has evolved from a permissive tool exploited by the most daring progressive practitioners to a mandatory process in workers’ Compensation. Florida’s courts will attempt to make e-filing mandatory soon. As civil e-filing is a much larger proposition, used by a larger population of attorneys, their challenges are greater. It is nonetheless a matter of pride that workers’ compensation practitioners tell me that their angst over civil e-filing has been minimal, because of their experience and comfort with OJCC e-filing gained in recent years.
E-filing was recently joined by e-service at the OJCC. The e-JCC program is now offering the opportunity to electronically serve filings on parties and others. Insurance carriers and third party administrators are registered in our e-service database. We are still working on adding carriers. Over 160 have been added in the last month.
When you e-serve someone through our service portal, as part of the e-filing process in e-JCC, there will be a certificate of service icon in the case docket. In e-JCC, in the “docket,” there is a description of the document in the center column. On the left side of the document name is a PDF icon.

This tells you that there is an actual image of a document available for you to view. Click on it to open. The right column is the certificate of service column. If there is an icon that column, that means that the document was served. Clicking on this icon:
open the certificate of service screen and you can view the name and email addresses of the persons served with the document. Fairly self-explanatory. What many do not know, though, is that the OJCC does more than send these emails. Some attorneys have asked why they do not get a confirmation to prove that the email with their document arrived at the addressee. We do not provide this confirmation. But, each service email sent by the OJCC includes a link to the document that is being served. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that links to documents can be sent using far less bandwidth than emailing the document itself. Another is that the link method allows us to confirm when that particular link is used.
When an emailed link, all of which are unique, is opened by the email addressee we make a record of that fact. When the link is opened, then you will see a date and time appear in the far right column of the certificate of service screen, like this:

How will you know? Now you know.

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