Supreme Court Posts

You Have Been Warned: Attorneys Are Not To File Motions To Reconsider

It is a rare thing for the Supreme Court to admonish the entire bar.  In a recent case, however, the Court took the bar to task for its practice of filing motions to reconsider.

To begin with, motions to reconsider do not exist.  Instead, as the Court pointed out, they are a “fiction”--they do not appear in our Rules of Civil Procedure and they are not authorized by those Rules.  Previously, the Court has been very accommodating, treating any motion filed within 10 days as a motion under Rule 59(e) to alter or amend the judgment.  But no more.  The failure of attorneys to properly identify their postjudgment motions “unnecessarily burdens both lower and appellate courts with untangling the nature of the relief sought and, more importantly, obfuscates the proper analysis to be employed to ascertain if relief is warranted.”  With uncommon bluntness, the Court stated simply:  “It is time this practice comes to an end.”

The Court stopped short of overruling its prior cases.  However, its admonition did come with some teeth: “The filing of motions which fail to identify the Rule of Civil Procedure or other legal authority providing the right to relief may serve as grounds for summary denial.”

Summing up, the Court observed: “We trust this admonition will yield the extinction of the so-called motion to reconsider.”

I really don’t think the Court could have been any clearer.  The next time you’re writing a postjudgment motion, be sure to pull out your rule book.  Find the proper rule, cite it in the text, and incorporate it into the title.  It could make all of the difference in the world…

Malone v. Potomac Highlands Airport Authority, No. 14-0849 (W.Va. 10/7/15)