TRENT SPECKHALS v. GOLF & TENNIS PRO SHOP, INC.

Trent Speckhals and Jorge Cora sued Golf & Tennis Pro Shop, Inc. (doing business as PGA Tour Superstore) and related companies over whether they could exercise warrants to buy company stock. A trial court granted summary judgment against them and struck documents they filed opposing the company's own summary judgment motion, ruling those documents were filed too late under a Georgia procedural statute, O.C.G.A. § 9-11-6 (e). The Court of Appeals of Georgia summarily affirmed without a full written opinion. Speckhals and Cora asked the Supreme Court of Georgia to review the case, arguing among other things that the statute actually gave them extra time to respond because notice of the opposing motion came through an e-mail generated by the court's electronic filing system. The Supreme Court of Georgia denied the request for review, meaning the lower rulings stand. Justice Warren, joined by four other Justices, wrote separately to explain that she disagreed with the trial court's reading of the statute but did not think this particular case was the right vehicle to settle the question.

The court denied certiorari, leaving the Court of Appeals of Georgia's summary affirmance in place, without deciding whether Georgia's three-day extension rule for service by e-mail (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-6 (e)) applies to e-mail notices generated by an electronic filing service provider.

Because the trial court's narrow reading of the three-day e-mail rule was left unresolved, Georgia lawyers and litigants who rely on e-filing notification e-mails to calculate response deadlines face continued uncertainty about how much time they actually have to respond to motions.

Certiorari denied

1. The court explained that one of the petitioners' arguments, about whether the trial court properly granted summary judgment, was simply a fact-specific dispute asking the court to correct an error, not the kind of broadly important legal question the Supreme Court of Georgia takes up on discretionary review.
2. A separate question, whether Georgia's three-day extension rule for e-mail service (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-6 (e)) covers e-mails automatically generated by an electronic court-filing system, was important enough to matter statewide, but the court still chose not to use this case to answer it.
3. In her concurrence, Justice Warren reasoned that the plain wording of O.C.G.A. § 9-11-6 (e) grants extra time whenever a document is served by e-mail, with no exception written into the statute for e-mails sent through an electronic filing service.
4. She reinforced that reading by pointing to a related statute, O.C.G.A. § 9-11-5, which treats an attorney's consent to receive filings through an electronic filing service as equivalent to being served a document by e-mail.
5. Because the trial court had said striking the late documents would not have changed its summary judgment ruling anyway, and the Court of Appeals of Georgia never wrote a published opinion addressing the statutory question, the concurrence concluded this case was not a clean vehicle for the Supreme Court of Georgia to settle the issue.

• electronic filing deadlines
• summary judgment
• stock warrants
• certiorari denial
• service by e-mail