Wednesday, September 16, 2026
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C.A. Faults Clerk’s Office for Bouncing of Notice of Appeal
Opinion Says Arbitrariness Exceeds That Spotlighted in Aug. 24 Opinion
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Unreasonableness on the part of a Superior Court clerk’s office in bouncing a notice of appeal has, for the second time in a period of less than a month, drawn scorn of a court of appeal, with the First District’s Div. Five holding that there was no justification for the rejection of such a document and that a judge subsequently erred in sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend and ordering a judgment of dismissal.
Justice Danny Y. Chou authored the opinion which reverses a judgment by Marin Superior Court Judge Sheila Shah Lichtblau. It declares that a notice of appeal that plaintiff Tim Sakach attempted to file on Jan. 9, 2024, contesting an adverse court determination of his challenge to an administrative order, is to be deemed filed on that date.
Had it been accepted on Jan. 9, it would have been timely. It was shunned based on the Clerk’s Office’s notion that it was defective because a copy of the administrative decision was not attached.
Sakach resubmitted the notice of appeal with such an attachment; it was accepted; but the file date on the second notice was beyond the period for permissibly filing such a notice, and Lichtblau proclaimed the appeal to be untimely.
Fifth District Opinion
Chou made note of the Fifth District’s Aug. 24 opinion in Gharraee v. Trader Joe’s Company which disapproved an action by the Stanislaus Superior Court Clerk’s Office in snubbing a notice of appeal on the ground that, under a local rule, such a document may not be electronically filed, with the rejection rendering the appeal untimely. The Fifth District held that a superior court may not, consistent with statewide standards, “adopt a local rule that mandates electronic filing in civil cases except for particular documents or categories of documents.”
In Monday’s decision, Chou said:
“Indeed, the superior court’s ground for rejecting Sakach’s January 9, 2024 notice of appeal is even more suspect than the ground cited by the trial court in Gharraee. The clerk’s rejection notice identified, and we found, no local rule, much less any other authority, requiring that the administrative decision be attached to a notice of appeal.”
He wrote that “[a]dding arbitrary requirements with no basis in the law in order to deprive parties of their right to appeal violates” the firm public policy that appeals should be determined “on the merits.”
The jurist went on to say:
“There is no dispute that if the superior court had filed Sakach’s first notice of appeal on January 9, 2024, as it should have, then this appeal would have been timely. Thus, the only remaining issue is whether the court erred in refusing to take judicial notice of the documents submitted with Sakach’s opposition to the demurrer, which would have established that the court erroneously refused to file his January 9 notice of appeal. We find that it did.”
Judicial Notice Denied
Chou rejected Lichtblau’s notion that she could not take judicial notice of the Clerk’s Office notice of rejection on the ground that it was not a court record. He set forth:
“[T]he rejection notice was sufficient, by itself, to establish that it was a court record because it: (1) identified the court; (2) bore the court’s seal; (3) identified the notice of appeal as the rejected document; (4) identified Sakach as the filer; (5) stated that the rejected filing was received on January 9, 2024; and (6) included the same administrative case number as the January 17, 2024 notice of appeal that the court accepted for filing.”
The justice said that Lichtblau should have “applied the rule that ‘a paper is deemed filed when it is deposited with the clerk with directions to file the paper,’ ” quoting that language from a 1998 decision by Div. Sixof this district’s Court of Appeal in Rojas v. Cutsforth. There, Acting Presiding Justice Arthur Gilbert (later presiding justice, now retired) said:
“It is difficult enough to practice law without having the clerk’s office as an adversary. Here, paltry nit-picking took the place of common sense and fairness.”
Gilbert noted in that decision:
“Plaintiff’s counsel said, ‘If there is a case that needs to be reversed, it is this one.’ We agree and reverse.”
Plaintiff’s counsel in that case was Randolph Hammock, now a judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court.
The case decided on Monday is Sakach v. County of Marin, 2026 S.O.S. 2933.
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