Which are the requirements for communicating exhibits before the French administrative courts?

There are rules for the communication of exhibits specific to French administrative law which are set out in the Code of Administrative Justice, as well as in the documentation available on the Télérecours website.

More precisely:

• Pursuant to the provisions of Article R. 414-5 of the Code of Administrative Justice in its wording resulting from Decree No. 2020-1245 of October 9, 2020, which came into force on January 1, 2021, "the applicant shall transmit each exhibit by a separate file, under penalty of inadmissibility of the request." The same article specifies that each of these files "shall bear a heading beginning with the serial number assigned to the exhibit it contains by the detailed inventory". The title of each exhibit must also describe "its content in a sufficiently explicit manner".

• The Télérecours service documentation on documents specifies that "the title of each exhibit must not exceed 80 characters", "special characters ("%", "/", "&", etc.) or accented characters or ". " as this can disrupt the filing of the exhibits or their uploading", but that "dashes " - " and underscores " _ " are allowed". In addition, this documentation states that "bookmark" names should be "in the form of 'PJ1_item name'". As of the date of the last update of the e-signum application (June 21, 2021), the documentation of the Telecourse service has not yet been updated to refer to the decree n° 2020-1245 of October 9, 2020. As it stands, the e-signum team therefore recommends continuing to apply the clarifications provided by this documentation on the title of each exhibit. Only the clarification concerning the name of the bookmarks is deprived of purpose since January 1, 2021 (each exhibit must be communicated by a separate file from this last date, which excludes the use of bookmarks).

• The National Internal Rules of the legal profession (RIN) provide in article 5 that "the exhibits must be numbered, bear the lawyer’s stamp and be accompanied by a list of the exhibits dated and signed by the lawyer". These provisions are applicable before the administrative courts when the author of the communication of documents is a lawyer.

The exhibits stamping tool allow the user to prepare exhibits and a list of exhibits that can be communicated via Télérecours, with the user remaining responsible for the control and validity of the communication of exhibits prepared by the application.

In order to comply with the rules explained above, the user must ensure that, in the "Exhibits stamping" tool, the following options (selected by default) remain selected:

• the option "1 file per exhibit (Télérecours obligation)",
• the option "Add PJX_ before the name of each exhibit".

Télérecours service limits the size of the files that can be transmitted to 32 MB.