The Utah Rules of Civil Procedure have changed this month with regards to time period for filing motion papers and some of those changes are significant. The amendments to these time periods were made in an effort to bring Utah more closely aligned with the federal rules.
New Response and Reply Times for Motions
Whenever a motion is filed the opposing party to the motion has to file an opposition. If he doesn’t he is deemed to have submitted the issue. The moving party can file a reply after receiving the opposition papers, but he doesn’t have to. Up until this month, the responding party had ten days from the time the motion was filed to file an opposition. The moving party had five days after being served the opposition papers to file a reply brief. Those time periods have now changed to fourteen and seven days, respectively.
New Time Periods for Proposed Orders
When a court makes a decision on a party’s motion it will ask one of the parties to prepare an order reflecting the court’s decision. Prior to this month the party preparing the order was required to serve the other party with the proposed order within 15 days of the court’s decision and then the other party had five days to file any objections to the proposed order. Those times have changed to 21 days and seven days, respectively.
New Response Period for Family Law Motions
There is also a new time period for parties in a family law matter to file opposition papers to a motion. Opposition and response papers must now be filed seven days before the hearing is scheduled. It used to only be five days.
