On April 20, 2012, Sens. Morgan Carroll and Ellen Roberts and Reps. Bob Gardner and Crisanta Duran introduced SB 12-175 – Concerning Statutorily Established Time Intervals. This summary is published here courtesy of the Colorado Bar Association’s e-Legislative Report.
The long awaited and much anticipated bill of the session is here!
Introduced on Friday, April 20 and scheduled for Senate Judiciary on Monday, April 23, SB 175 – Concerning statutorily established time intervals is ready for prime time.
Background and Purpose:
On January 1, 2012 the Colorado Supreme Court adopted time interval/time computation rules that impact various areas of the practice of law. In conjunction with the pure court rules there are numerous Court Rules that have a statutory basis. Legislation is required to bring the statutorily based court rules in line with the new court rules that were adopted in January.
The Colorado Bar Association (CBA) involvement with this bill has been along the lines of “assisting” the Supreme Court’s Civil Rules Committee with the passage of legislation that amends the statutorily based civil rules. The CBA has been working on the bill draft to make sure that we amend all the statutes that impact Court Rules. Our substantive sections of the CBA have been pouring over the bill draft for weeks in an effort to bring forth the most comprehensive bill draft possible. This bill is 100% technical. Nothing in it provides advantages to one party in a case over another; it merely changes time intervals and time computations for cases filed in Colorado courts.
The new rules and the proposed statutory changes that we bring are patterned after recent reform of the Federal Rules (trial court and appellate) that were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress in 2009. As in the Federal Rule concept, a day is a day, and because calendars are divided into seven-day week intervals, groupings of days are in seven-day intervals, sometimes referred to as “Rule of 7.” Groupings of less than seven days are left as they are because such smaller numbers do not interfere with the underlying concept.
Historically, state court rules have patterned federal rules because practitioners often practice in both court systems. It is particularly desirable to have similar time interval/time computation systems. The proposed concept differs from the Federal system in one respect: the Federal Rules have retained the three-days-for-service feature, whereas the proposed state court rule eliminates it. This is largely due to the fact that near universal mandatory e-filing/serving makes the three-days-for-service unnecessary and not worth the additional confusion it adds to the process.
Since this summary, the bill passed a Second Reading in the Senate with amendments.
Summaries of other featured bills can be found here.
