E-filing rejections are rarely about the merits. They are about file mechanics. State e-filing authorities have published, at length, the mechanical reasons documents bounce — and the pattern is consistent across jurisdictions. Here are the causes, roughly in order of how often they bite.
A scan is a picture of a document, however crisp. Court staff search filings constantly — for case numbers, party names, statute references. A picture of text defeats that, so portals either reject the document or rasterize/convert it — a step court technology staff have described as a nightmare at scale, and one that has motivated whole compliance campaigns. The fix is OCR before filing: Acrobat's Recognize Text, or any OCR tool, then export text-based PDF/A.
If the PDF references Helvetica but doesn't contain it, every machine that opens the file guesses a substitute. Line breaks move; a page that fit on one page becomes two. Several courts explicitly warn against "smallest file size" export settings because they strip fonts. Embedded fonts are also a hard PDF/A requirement.
The filename says motion-pdfa.pdf. The bytes say otherwise: no XMP identification, no PDF/A output intent, fonts missing. Clerks' portals validate the file, not the filename. Being "saved from Word" is not the same as "exported as PDF/A".
PDF/A prohibits encryption and so do filing workflows: the clerk must be able to open, search, and process the document without credentials. Password-protected and permission-locked files are routine rejections.
Court technology standards commonly prohibit embedded file attachments, form fields with actions, document-level JavaScript, hidden deleted content, and embedded non-display data — because the clerk's workflow flattens, invalidates, or deletes them, and the clerk's copy then differs from what you filed. Some standards publish explicit permitted/prohibited element lists: bookmarks, electronic signatures and internal links are typically fine; attachments and JavaScript are not.
Single-submission caps are common — one state's supreme court standard caps a single filing at 50 MB; other portals set their own limits per document. Oversized files fail silently or reject at upload. Compress scans, but never by stripping embedded fonts.
PDF 2.0 files, XFA forms, portfolios, and layers can trip older validators. When in doubt, plain PDF 1.7-exported PDF/A-2b is the safest target.