In law, filing is the delivery of a document to the clerk of a court and the acceptance of the document by the clerk for placement into the official record. If a document is delivered to the clerk and is temporarily placed or deposited with the court (but is not accepted for filing), it is said to have been lodged with or received by the court (but not filed). Courts will not consider motions unless an appropriate memorandum or brief is filed before the appropriate deadline. Usually a filing fee is paid which is part of court costs. Filing systems In civil procedure systems, filing rules can be mandatory or permissive. In a mandatory filing system, all documents of legal importance exchanged between the parties must also be concurrently filed with the court, while in a permissive filing system, nothing needs to be filed until the case reaches a point where direct judicial management is absolutely necessary (such as the brink of trial). For example, the United States federal courts operate on a mandatory filing system (with minor exceptions for the most routine discovery exchanges). In contrast, from the reign of Edward IV during the late 1400s to the late 1990s (that is, before the 1998 promulgation of the Civil Procedure Rules), the trial courts of England and Wales normally did not maintain comprehensive pretrial case files (beyond recording the issuance of a writ to initiate a legal proceeding). Instead, after service of a writ, the parties merely served their pleadings on each other, then at some point in time, one party would ask the court to set down the case for trial (that is, put the case on a list of cases awaiting the setting or "fixture" of trial dates) and lodge two copies of the pleadings with the court (along with other documents relevant to the planned trial). Even after they had been lodged (i.e., temporarily deposited) with the court, the pleadings were not filed immediately. Rather, one copy was for the personal use of the judge, while the other copy would be officially filed after the trial together with the judgment to establish the court's permanent record of the issues that had been formally adjudicated at trial. In the United States, a permissive filing system has persisted to the present in the state of New York, which was modified in 1992 but still largely operates in its