Appearances and Jury Demands in Winnebago County eFiling

• Oct 22, 2018
• Illinois
• by Tisha Delgado

As with most counties in Illinois, there are specific rules and procedures to follow when electronically filing your court documents. These varying rules apply when eFiling Appearances and Jury Demands in Winnebago County.

When eFiling in Winnebago County, be sure to have the correct format for your case number. To locate a Winnebago case, you will need to enter dashes and make sure that your case number has seven digits. If your case number does not have the complete seven numbers, use leading zeros as placeholders as demonstrated in the example below:

2018-L-0000123

According to the court clerk in Winnebago, Appearances and Jury Demands are filed as separate documents. Please be aware that there court fees associated with each document type. If you have not paid for both the Appearance and Jury Demand court cost, the filing will be rejected.

Appearances

In civil cases, an appearance is filed to declare that an attorney will be representing a certain party in the case.

After uploading the Appearance form, the court filing fee will automatically populate in the Filing Fees section.

In the example below, you can see the court filing fee for the Appearance is $198.00. This charge is not collected by CourtFiling.net, but it is a required court cost and is standard across all electronic filing service providers.

Jury Demands

A Jury Demand is simply a request to have a jury hear your case. It notifies the court that the defendant wants a jury instead of a judge to analyze the case in a trial. One must file a Jury Demand to properly notify the court of your intentions to be heard by a jury.

Opposite of an Appearance, uploading a Jury Demand will not automatically trigger the required court fee. Rather, after you have uploaded your Jury Demand, you must expand the Optional Services drop-down box in order to select the jury demand entry.

Select the jury demand entry that you want and that is applicable to your case:

This is the only way to select the fee for the Jury Demand. As with other court documents, each jury demand type has its own associated fees that are owed to the court itself. If you do not pay for the Jury Demand fee, your filing will be rejected by the clerk.

Filing both an Appearance and Jury Demand

If you have to file both an Appearance and Jury Demand for your case, you should be able to include both in one envelope/filing.

To file an Appearance and Jury Demand in the same transaction or envelope, start the eFiling process as normal. Upload both documents and be sure to select the Jury Demand fee from the Optional Services section.

When you get to the Filing Fees section, confirm that you see estimated fees for both the Appearance and the Jury Demand to make sure that the system recognizes both document types.

eFiling in accordance with varying county rules can be overwhelming. Be sure to look for any local court rules and if you are not sure, contact the court clerk’s office. CourtFiling.net is also available to help guide you with their help articles and Illinois content-specific blog.

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