Legal Research

Rules of Procedure- What Are They Good For?

By Leslie A. Pardo

Each court has a set of rules that govern how the court is run.  They provide guidelines that the lawyers and parties must follow in litigation.

You need to look at the rules of procedure for the court, in which, you are litigating to learn the proper steps to take to carry out the litigation. Failure to follow the rules may be grounds for dismissal of your lawsuit or for sanctions against the parties and/or lawyers.

Rules of procedure are interpreted by the courts.  You will need to look at the case law that interprets the rules if they are not clear.  You will also want to look at the committee notes or advisory comments at the end of the rule to further understand how to follow that rule. The comments section in the state court rules will sometimes tell you which federal rule the state rule is based on.  This will allow you to find federal case law, in case there is not any state case law interpreting the rule.  You may also want to look at the appendix to the rules, there you may find sample forms, timelines and other valuable information. 

Always make sure that you are updating the rule as you would a statute.  The rules are updated by Supreme Court Orders or sometimes by statutes.

When you are filing a complaint, answer, motion or pleading there are several rules of procedure that you will need to look at, not merely one rule.

Court rules of procedure are found in hard copy books (either as part of the statutes or in a separate set), in secondary sources, on the courts web sites and on pay services such as Lexis, Loislaw and Westlaw.

KeyRules on Westlaw
If you are filing a complaint, answer, motion or pleading and need to find all the rules that apply to your filing, KeyRules will pull them all together for you. They will also include judicial holdings, as well as a checklist of tasks, forms, and timing considerations.

KeyRules is currently available for:

• All Federal District Courts
• All Federal Bankruptcy Courts
• Federal Claims Court
• The following State courts

CA                  FL
IL                   LA
MI                  MO
NC                 NJ
NY                 OH
OR                 PA
TX                 VA
WA

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on April 05, 2010 (boomark / email).