Okay, so it’s about 2:00 in the afternoon today when I finish a brief. An uncharacteristically brief brief, in fact — only three pages and a proof of service. It had to be filed in the Simi Valley branch of the Ventura County Superior Court today. So I give it to my paralegal and ask her to get it fax-filed. It’s not an emergency matter and it’s not a particularly hectic day at the office one way or another, so no one has any damage about any of this.
Until she calls the local attorney service for a reference. She is told “Here’s the people I refer to in Ventura County, but I don’t know if they’ll have enough free time today to get the thing filed.”
Huh? It’s 2:00 in the afternoon. The clerk’s office is open until 4:30 unless they have some bizarre rule in Simi Valley, and the local attorney service there is two blocks from the courthouse. So what’s going on out in Ventura County that they can’t receive a four-page fax and file it two blocks away in two and a half hours? Is the surf up today? Is the pot that good? Too many ripe avocados to harvest? They’re all just too wealthy out there to be bothered providing a service to us? If that’s the way things are, I want to work in Ventura County, too.
