Many of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) will change in the near future including provisions that impact timing requirements in bankruptcy cases.
The Judicial Conference of the United States, through its Time-Computation Subcommittee, issued proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which the U.S. Supreme Court approved on March 26, 2009, to be effective on December 1, 2009.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been confused or unsure at times when trying to determine whether to include or exclude weekends, or which holidays are considered as such, when calculating federal court deadlines.
Well I have some good news. Things are about to get much easier for us bankruptcy lawyers under the new “Days are Days” approach of time computation. As part of an overall “Time-Computation Project,” FRCP 6(a), which is the rule that governs computing and extending time, has been modified to make the method of computing time consistent and clear.
Currently, the computation of rules involving periods less than 11 days are generally different than for periods more than 11 days—intermediate weekends and holidays are usually omitted when computing shorter periods, but included for longer periods. This discrepancy has led to unnatural results, as it has not been uncommon for a 10-day period and a 14-day period that began the same day to also end on the same day due to intervening weekends and holidays.
Under the revised counting rules also knows as the “Days are Days” approach, intermediate weekends and holidays will be counted, regardless of the length of the specified counting period. A notable exception is when the counting period ends on a weekend or legal holiday, in which case the deadline falls on the next business day that is neither a weekend nor a legal holiday.
To compensate for the new time-computation methods, the Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States reviewed every rule to make sure that shorter deadlines would still be reasonable.
To that end, most 5-day deadlines will be extended to 7 days and most 10-day deadlines will be extended to 14 days. The revised rules also implement 7, 14, 21 and 28-day periods as often as possible so that deadlines will almost always fall on weekdays.
FRCP 6 will include a new subdivision (a)(2), which deals with the computation of time periods that are measured in hours.
These hourly deadlines begin to run immediately on the occurrence of an event and will naturally end when the allotted time expires.
If the period ends on a weekend or legal holiday, however, the deadline is extended to the same time on the first business day that is not a weekend or legal holiday.
For example, if a deadline is set to expire at 11:23 a.m. on a Saturday, it will actually expire at 11:23 a.m. on the following Monday.
Another new provision has been added to address the timing of electronic filings: In the absence of a statute, local rule or court order providing otherwise, the last day of a period for an electronic filing ends at midnight, giving lawyers who are pressed for time a few extra hours of leeway.
