8/15/08 - criblaw staff

The Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure recommends approval of time-computation proposal. If all goes as planned, the new rules would go into effect in December 2009. What does this mean for you? Well, the Time-Computation proposal was established to alleviate much of the confusion created with date calculations in Federal Rules that are 11 days or less compared to periods of 11 days or more.

When this goes into effect, the basic principle will apply "a day is a day". No longer will you need to worry about weekends or holidays in counting your time periods. Although, if you land on a weekend or holiday, you will need to move to the next court day. Our understanding is that this is being given a large window of time before going into effect to allow local courts to rewrite their local rules to take the new laws into account. 10 days periods will need to be lengthened to allow for time periods to not be drastically affected.

All in all, this should defintely be a banner day for all legal professionals who have ever had the task of deciphering the deadlines in Federal Court regarding the less than 11 day time intervals.

Please take some time to review the Reports and Comments on the Federal Judiciary website. A few links of interest are as follows:

Amendments approved by standing committee

Comments submitted on proposed Time-Computation Amendments

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