Effective December 1, 2017, the United States District Court in Rhode Island amended its local rules. One of the more significant changes is to Local Civil Rule 7 (or LR Cv 7, as it’s known in the biz) to eliminate the requirement of filing a legal memorandum along with a civil motion. Before the change, the District of Rhode Island (aka the D.R.I.) required a legal memorandum for most motions except motions to compel in discovery disputes. Now, litigants have the option to jettison legal memoranda and put all their arguments into the body of the motion for all types of disputes. Under the new local rule, litigants can still choose to file a memorandum if they prefer (presumably, if they’re feeling nostalgic or paean for the old days).
So what’s the significance of the change? For starters, it should reduce clutter on the electronic docket. In the past, some litigants filed memoranda as separate docket entries; others filed them as attachments to motions. Either way, particularly in long-running or complex cases, the filing of memoranda made it more difficult for the court staff and the litigants to read the docket and understand the procedural history.
The presence of memoranda on the docket also led to confusion on occasion. For example, if a party moved for summary judgment and attached a memorandum to the motion, the memorandum could also have attachments in the form of record citations, which might also have further attachments. This led to a rabbit hole of attachments: a summary judgment motion might cite to a memo attachment, which cited to a statement of undisputed facts, which cited to an affidavit attachment, which in turn cited to a piece of record evidence (also attached). The elimination of the memo makes these situations less confusing. For summary judgment motions, as noted in the new revisions to Local Rule 56, statements of undisputed facts must be filed as stand-alone docket entries with their own attachments.
The elimination of memoranda should also reduce inefficiencies for simple motions. Technically, the old rule required a memo to accompany a simple motion to extend time. In these types of situations, the memo was redundant to the motion and usually a waste of everyone’s time.
Still, the dichotomy of the motion and legal memorandum has its uses. Litigants usually put the specific relief they seek into the motion, while the memo explains the legal basis for the requested relief. With the merger of the motion and memo, litigants can now put the request for relief and legal argument in one place, but it will be more important to delineate between the relief sought and argument, or risk judicial confusion.
With the legal memorandum resigned to take its place in history with other obsolete items, it’s worth pausing and remembering all those legal memos bouncing around the D.R.I’s archives. The legal memo is dead in the D.R.I. Long live the memo.