On March 5, I properly served the Proposed Record on Appeal through the Wake County Superior Court’s Odyssey eFile and eServe system. Under Rule 26(c) and Rule 11(b), that triggered the 10-day clock for objections, making opposing counsel’s deadline April 4. I never heard from him, so on Monday, April 7, around noon, I served him the Settled Record. Rather than respond appropriately, he ignored it and waited until later that evening—after the deadline had passed—to send a courtesy email containing his objections.
When I reminded him the deadline had passed and that the record was settled, he falsely claimed that service through Odyssey was improper and tried to invoke the three-day mailing rule under Rule 27, which doesn’t apply to Odyssey or email service. His own filings admitted he received the service email on March 5, and even referred to it in a prior filing—proving he was properly served and knew it. Despite all this, he filed a motion asking the Court of Appeals to deem his objections timely or, alternatively, to retroactively extend the deadline under Rule 27(c) and Rule 37. In that motion, he cited his own unrelated workload, travel, and even a family death as reasons for delay—but those excuses don’t override the plain language of the rules or excuse his failure to object on time.
Even worse, the Court of Appeals granted his motion. They ignored my motion to strike and dismissed my motion to reconsider without directly ruling on it—marking it only as “Other” in the docket. The outcome was that his objections—which were indisputably late—were accepted, and the record was redirected into a Rule 11(c) process, giving him the opportunity to revise the record and stall the appeal.
What makes this even more troubling is that the Court of Appeals went against its own established precedent by granting an untimely motion that should have been handled at the trial level under Rule 11(c). In past cases like Groves v. Community Housing of Haywood and White v. Carver, the Court clearly held that disputes over the record on appeal must be resolved by the trial judge who issued the original ruling—and not by the appellate court prior to docketing. Here, the Court ignored that rule, accepted a motion improperly filed under the writ docket, and failed to even clarify which rule authorized their action. They applied Rule 27(b)’s three-day extension to a form of service (email/Odyssey) where that rule doesn’t apply, creating a direct conflict with Rule 5(b) and Rule 26(c). Worse, they did all of this without identifying what service method triggered the deadline, and without addressing the acknowledged March 5 service date that the opposing party referenced in their own filings. This not only undermined the rules but created procedural ambiguity that affects all future pro se appeals—and signaled that the Court was willing to bend its own rules to accommodate a represented party.