There is a long tale about a recent e-filing snafu that the LIT Lab encountered, and a short one. It’s a dashing tale with adventures, mysteries, and unfortunately, a real life impact, albeit one handled with grace by the great staff at the Massachusetts Appeals Court. The difference between the long one and the short one is what caused our troubles.
And there our troubles began
This is an en dash: –
It’s a character that isn’t easy to type manually on most keyboards, but you might find tools like Microsoft Word inserting it for you when you type space-hyphen-space between two words.
This is a hypen: –
And this is an em dash: —
See the difference?
What is an en dash?
The en dash is a punctuation character that typesetters use most often to indicate a range, for example, 1–10. In contrast, an (apparently controversial) em dash is used to offset two ideas in a sentence—playing a similar role to a colon, semi-colon, or parentheses, but providing a different emphasis. The humble hyphen, the one that most of us see on our keyboard next to the number keys, is for use in compound words like water-proof, ex-president, or to connect a unit of measurement with its unit, perhaps when describing an 11-foot long alligator.
For most folks, the only character on this list that is easy to type is the hyphen. On a Macintosh, there are two-key shortcuts for the special symbols, while on a Windows computer, the shortcuts are a byzantine 4-key code.
I have to admit, although Sam Glover on our team, the former owner and editor of Lawyerist, knows these details cold, I had to brush up on these distinctions for this blog. I found this nice summary at Grammarist.com. You might also want to check out the style guides, variously, of Microsoft, Chicago Manual of Style, and the (paywalled) Bluebook.
The important fact for our purposes is that all 3 characters, while looking alike, are totally unique from the computer’s point of view.
So what’s the big fuss?
The LIT Lab is, as far as we know, the only nonprofit group that has a certification from Tyler Technologies to electronically file court documents with Tyler’s filing system used by more than a dozen U.S. state courts. We have used this integration to connect guided interviews made in Docassemble directly to the court docket in both Illinois and Massachusetts, saving litigants time, physical travel, and helping reduce errors in filing.
A mysterious report
A few weeks ago, the Lab got a report from the Massachusetts Appeals Court that a form that had been working for months after an update suddenly was causing unpredictable errors. The form, our Motion to Stay Eviction, is mostly used when a tenant loses an eviction case at the trial court level. The electronic delivery that this form provides is important because Massachusetts has only one Appeals Court, in Boston, which can be 3 or more hours away by car (or boat) from tenants in parts of the state. A few years ago, a more primitive version of the form that delivered documents by email was used to literally stop movers who were in the process of taking a tenant’s belongings out of their home during the Commonwealth’s eviction moratorium.
Luckily, we had a workaround. We set up a method for the Appeals Court to manually download the filings, but it wasn’t offering the time savings that the court would usually get with e-filing.
The error message didn’t have a lot of details. It just said that the filing fee couldn’t be calculated, and it caught us at a tricky moment—just as we were onboarding a totally new software developer to manage our e-filing system, and when we were in the middle of migrating the system to a more automated deployment method with continuous integration on Fly.io.
Digging into the mystery
Our first guess was that a code refresh had gotten stuck, so we tried manually refreshing the codes. This took some time to execute, but it didn’t solve the problem.
Our current team and the new developer did briefly consider that one of the filing codes had changed, but everything looked right. What’s more, there had been a formal change of the filing codes that we coordinated with and tested with the Appeals Court on just a few months earlier. Meanwhile, filings had been rolling in after the change without any problems.
There are only a dozen possible codes in the Massachusetts Appeals Court, and a visual inspection didn’t turn up anything that looked wrong.
You guessed the end
So what ended up being the problem? After checking everything, and conferring a few times with the original developer of our e-filing system, who generously met with us after hours from his new full-time job, we zeroed back in on the filing codes.
It was our new developer’s eagle eye that spotted the errant en dash after combing over the relevant code for many hours.
Compare what our code was looking for: MAC Rule 6.0 – Motion to stay with the version stored in the court’s docket management system: MAC Rule 6.0 – Motion to stay. A hyphen, which seemingly was correct for months, actually had its more sophisticated and less-easily-typable cousin, the en dash. As far as we can guess, a court administrator must have entered the name of the code into Microsoft Word or a similar tool with an autocorrecting functionality.
We haven’t confirmed yet if the en dash was always present or it was accidentally added recently. One possibility is that transitional codes we had as a fallback were removed, misleading us early on when we migrated to the new code. That indicates room for us to expand our testing methodology and in particular, do more automated end-to-end testing.
I’m still impressed that our developer spotted the error!
Was it grammatically correct?
So an interesting question to me, as a sometimes grammar nerd, and past law journal editor, is whether the seemingly new version of the code is grammatically correct. After all, our brief summary of the various dashes suggest that an em dash would be more appropriate in this phrase. And in American usage, the em dash typically does not have any white space surrounding it. So a more phrasally correct version might be MAC Rule 6.0—Motion to stay, yet a third variation on a theme.
How we fixed things
Our code matching system already has some fuzzy logic, after discovering that in our partner jurisdiction of Illinois, the more than a hundred courts can each use a different numeric code for the exact same filing.
So, we just shortened the match we included in our code, to MAC Rule 6.0 for now. This refers to a unique rule in the Massachusetts Rules of Appellate Procedure, so it should stay unambiguous for the long term.
What else we’ll change
Although an eagle eye helped catch this problem, we don’t want to rely on that again. We’re improving our error logging so we spend less time chasing down mysteries and will add some new test suites to catch this problem up front on new forms.
We’re also working on better fallbacks when a code changes in production without warning.
Our recommendation
Our recommendations the next time a court partner updates a filing code? Stay away from ambiguous characters, and any that might fool you visually with a subtle too-helpful moment from your computer.
How standards could have helped
At one level, this was a problem caused by the imprecision of the English language, but in another way, it was caused by an unfair task. The Massachusetts Appeals Court had to figure out how to translate a legal concept into an unambiguous string of characters that were interpreted by a computer. It looked like an ordinary English sentence, but it played the part of computer code.
There is a solution for this already in the world, which we also suggest that courts adopt. The SALI Alliance has developed a standard set of terms for all kinds of legal concepts, called the Legal Matter Specification Standard, or LMSS. (While we had no role in its authorship, LIT Lab staff were among a huge international team of folks who offered comments and helped shape the current version of LMSS.)
LMSS has a unique, unambiguous reference that is translated into English for an Appellate Motion to Stay: Motion to Stay Proceedings.
It can be hard to change a legacy environment. But instead of making a new set of filing codes from scratch, we suggest using the unambiguous codes that exist in LMSS for courts engaging in a new e-filing journey.