A post by Karen Cole At last!   Minnesota courts are making many district court records available online.  You can now search by case number for many district court documents filed after July 1, 2015.   Public court documents will now be accessible online for most types of civil and criminal case cases.  Only court-generated documents will […]

A post from Karen R. Cole: The Problem: Thousands of legal documents are filed in Minnesota courts every year incorrectly filing confidential information in a way that is publicly accessible. About 100 noncompliant documents are filed each week.  Over 400 documents with confidential information were improperly filed as public documents in one week alone.  That […]

There is always a flurry of bills at the end of a legislative session.  One bill passed this past May made some changes to the statutes on guardians and conservators.  The legislation required that a confidential “bill of particulars” be filed with the trial court that would lay out the confidential or nonpublic documents filed […]

  The Judge ruled against the motion in limine you brought before trial.  You didn’t raise that in a new trial motion.  May you challenge the ruling on appeal?  In Bhakta, the Minnesota Court of Appeals said, “no.”  The Minnesota Supreme Court disagreed.  In a new decision in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court said, […]

July 1, 2018.  Amendments to the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure will take effect on that day.   Many of the proposed amendments will bring Minnesota’s civil procedure rules into conformity with the federal rules. Parts of rule 56 governing summary judgment will be amended. It is hard to compare the rule 56 provisions as they […]

    Judicial Independence Day – June 12 – marks the passage of the Act of Settlement in England in 1701.  For the first time, the King of England could not remove judges at will.  Judges could be removed only by Parliament, and served for life during “good behavior.”   This was an important step towards […]

Update:   It’s a time of transition.  The Twins season is winding down.  And the Minnesota Supreme Court is issuing the last of its decisions from the past term. Two important decisions were just released:  Gams and Cole.  These cases decide how two rules mesh – rule 5.04(a) and rule 60.02. Rule 5.04(a) was amended […]

  The latest from the Minnesota Supreme Court:  New amendments to the rules of civil appellate procedure were just adopted. As it happens, the amendments were mostly technical.  The amendments correct some inconsistencies in the rules and fine-tune them. A couple of the amendments are worth some special attention. Rule 128.03 now clarifies how parties […]

Minnesota has long followed the hip pocket rule:  a civil action is started when it is served.  A recent change to the requirements has tweaked that rule.  Now an action must also be filed within a year or it is “deemed dismissed.” What if a plaintiff misses that deadline and the action is dismissed?  Can […]

  In a recent per curiam decision, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped a bit away from Twombly and Iqbal. Twombly and Iqbal tightened pleading standards for federal court cases. Taken together, Twombly and Iqbal rejected the Conley v. Gibson standard, which said that a complaint was viable unless it appeared beyond doubt that the plaintiff […]