← All guides · Part of the court requirements series
Illinois is unusual in publishing an actual rejection standards table — "Electronic Filing Rejection Standards, Illinois Courts of Review", effective September 1, 2024 — mapping each rejection reason to its rule authority. Most reasons are procedural (signatures, captions, fees), but the PDF-mechanics entries are exactly the ones a pre-check catches.
| # | Rejection reason | The rule |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Document incomplete, illegible, unreadable, or completely blank | ILSC Rules 10 & 131. The clerk's own examples: "Scan is not dark enough. Handwriting is illegible." Blank forms and missing contact info land here too. |
| 17 | Multiple documents submitted as one document | "Multiple filings cannot be submitted in a single .PDF file. Please separate the documents and resubmit each separately." (Electronic Document Standards & ILSC Rule 10) |
| 18 | Single document submitted as multiple documents | "Please combine all pages of the single document into one .PDF file and resubmit." Explicit exception: cases where EFM file-size limits force splitting. |
| 28 | Not in compliance with the Electronic Document Standards | The eFileIL Electronic Document Standards catch-all — "rejected for the following reason(s) [INSERT DEFICIENCIES]". |
The Illinois courts' published tips ("12 Ways to Avoid a Rejected E-Filing") add the practical layer:
#17 and #18 point in opposite directions, so the test is what is "one document": a motion and its notice are two documents (split); a single order with all its pages is one (merge); exhibits attach to the document they belong to. Size is the only sanctioned reason to split one document — and if you do, remember the pieces still need searchable text and consistent pagination. Our combine/split guide walks the decision; the scan quality guide covers #11's causes.