Nobody likes a rejected filing. But it happens.
It’s not the kind of stat you brag about on social media posts or in a year-end company newsletter, but that data still matters. Analyzing rejections from the previous year can help us spot potential usability issues with the application and let us understand the common pain points for our users.
But this data can help others as well. Knowing the most common rejection reasons can help you understand what to look out for and adopt practices to avoid rejections. Here, we will briefly cover the broad categories of data we look at in our full report on rejections (which you can download on this page).
Broad Rejection Reasons in 2022 (percent)
For this analysis, we broke down rejection reasons into four common groups:
- Filing Procedure Issues: These are rejections stemming from problems like scheduling with the court, redundant submissions, eFiling availability, etc.
- Document Format Issues: These are rejections for problems like font choice to file type of documents.
- Incorrect Data: These are rejections due to incorrect documents, such as the wrong case number, date, or misspelling.
- Filer Request: These are rejections made at the filer’s request.
By these numbers, procedural issues are the most likely culprit of any single rejection. This makes sense, as the filing procedure itself is complex. Keeping up with the court schedule, deadlines, proof of service, and more can get overwhelming.
But procedural rejections don’t represent the true majority. A mix of clerical, factual, and other errors combined with self-requested rejections make up the remaining 55%. Within that portion of the rejections, we found some common mistakes that can be fixed with relatively simple proofreading before submission.
Want to Take a Deeper Dive?
Our full report includes information on specific rejection reasons like:
- How often misspelled names lead to rejections.
- The range of ways a document can be made partially/completely illegible.
- The rate at which late submissions lead to rejections.
If you would like access to the information above, and more, fill out the form below to receive the full report right in your email inbox.
