Briefing Deadlines Fixed

The Florida Supreme Court fixed briefing deadlines for cross-appeals and dependency and parental rights termination cases, effective January 1, 2019 at 12:03 am.

One of the biggest changes to the Appellate Rules this year is the counterbalancing of the deletion of 5 extra days for mailing with the lengthening of most appellate deadlines. Generally speaking, most deadlines that were formerly 5 days are now 10, for example, and the brief deadlines that used to be 20 days are now 30, and deadlines that used to be 10 days are now 15. You read that right — even though we’ve lost mailing days, we generally now have five or more additional days to serve most items. (Why or more? Because when the Court took away mailing days, it also gave a little extra boon of allowing you to start counting “on the next day that isn’t a “Saturday, Sunday, or Legal Holiday” rather than the next day, so you are no longer starting 3 days into your response time when you walk into your office on Monday morning to find something was filed after hours on Friday. We break down the new math in a prior blog post).

With all of those rule changes (three different orders!) something was bound to fall through the cracks. Under the October 25, 2018 orders, two appellate rules — Rules 9.146 and 9.210 — inadvertently kept the old, shorter deadlines. Luckly, the Appellate Rules Committee was on it, and moved the Florida Supreme Court for rehearing to fix the oversight. Rather than grant rehearing, the Court treated the motion as an “out of cycle report” from the committee, adopting the changes and making them in effect as 12:03am on January 1, 2019. See In re Amendments to Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure 9.146 & 9.210, No. SC18-1917, 43 Fla. L. Weekly S602 (Fla. Dec. 6, 2018)[.pdf]. Now cross appeal briefs have the same amount of time as initial and answer briefs, 30 days from service of the last brief. See Rule 9.210. And in dependency and termination of parental rights proceedings, practitioners also have the benefit of additional time (30 days for an answer and 15 days for a reply). See Rule 9.146.

The fully integrated .pdf rule set is now available on the Florida Bar’s website. Moreover, the fully integrated revised rules are also available at http://rules.floridaappellate.com.