North Dakota Supreme Court adopts federal rules changes in counting time

February 14, 2011

North Dakota: The North Dakota Supreme Court has approved of rule changes that will take effect March 1, 2011, and will bring North Dakota's legal counting rules in accordance with federal rule changes that took effect December 1, 2009. This new counting system purports to be simpler and implements a days-are-days approach to calculating time periods. According to these new rules all days, including intermediate weekends and holidays, will be included when computing time periods. This differs from the previous rules in which weekends and holidays where not counted when working with short periods of time, but were counted when working with longer periods. The federal rules regarding this matter were changed after multiple complaints from the bar were filed over what they deemed to be unnecessary complexity in the time-computation rules. For a full report on the rule changes to take effect March 1, please see here.