New Civil Summons Available on practicelaw
One of our recent posts outlined changes to the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure and the Minnesota Supreme Court’s approval of a new civil summons, modeled after a civil summons in New Hampshire. After that post, we got to work on producing a civil summons with the newly approved language. The new civil summons is now available on practicelaw with other civil litigation forms. Though the new summons is not required until July 1, we’ve released it now so that it’s available for cases that may be ready to commence but may not be commenced until after June 30. At the same time, we’ll hang on to the “old” summons until July 1, after which we will remove it from the site.
In the last month, we’ve received a number of questions as to the applicability of the new civil summons to family law matters, specifically marital dissolution matters. The MSBA’s family law list-serv also had a healthy debate about whether language in the new summons is now required for a summons in a marital dissolution case. Our simple answer was no. I elaborated on this in a subsequent post to the list-serv:
From a practical standpoint – and speaking as someone who has been closely involved with form development in the last several years– it’s a pretty complicated matter to revise a form such as a Summons, particularly if the thought is to make it a “uniform” form and to lessen the legalese. Because of that, we have not considered modifying the marital dissolution summons without working with a number of family law practitioners to tackle a new draft, to edit, and ultimately to pursue approval a new form. Tom Tuft and I have talked about this and I volunteered my time to help work on looking at a new summons for marital dissolution matters, so long as we received sufficient support from other MSBA members.
Comments