Cal. Rules of Court, rule 2.517 · Article 3. Remote Access by a Party, Party's Designee, Party's Attorney, Court-Appointed Person, or Authorized Person Working in a Legal Organization or Qualified Legal Services Project
Remote access by a party
Text — As posted by the Judicial Council of California (read October 22, 2026)
(a) Remote access generally permitted
A person may have remote access to electronic records in actions or proceedings in which that person is a party.
(b) Level of remote access
(1) In any action or proceeding, a party may be provided remote access to the same electronic records that he or she would be legally entitled to inspect at the courthouse.
(2) This rule does not limit remote access to electronic records available under article 2.
(3) This rule applies only to electronic records. A person is not entitled under these rules to remote access to documents, information, data, or other materials created or maintained by the courts that are not electronic records.
Notes and commentary — not rule text
History
Rule 2.517 adopted effective January 1, 2019.
Advisory Committee Comment
Because this rule permits remote access only by a party who is a person (defined under rule 2.501 as a natural human being), remote access would not apply to parties that are organizations, which would need to gain remote access under the party's attorney rule or, for certain government entities with respect to specified electronic records, the rules in article 4.
A party who is a person would need to have the legal capacity to agree to the terms and conditions of a court's remote access user agreement before using a system of remote access. The court could deny access or require additional information if the court knew the person seeking access lacked legal capacity or appeared to lack capacity-for example, if identity verification revealed the person seeking access was a minor.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As posted by the Judicial Council of California (read October 22, 2026)
- Official file
- https://courts.ca.gov/cms/rules/index/two/rule2_517
- Text hash
- sha256 35100df0f74fedcc4fd7ee99cd7a5b2e3ee3f8a2c528d073f6be7de11d2b731b
- Composed by
- compose_crc.py 2026-10-22: the Judicial Council's rule pages read paragraph by paragraph; verify_crc.py's second reading of the Council's per-title PDFs finds every paragraph
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California Rules of Court
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