Rule 50.Motion for Directed Verdict and for Judgment Notwithstanding Verdict

Rule 50 handles the moment when one side thinks the other has not put on enough evidence to let a jury decide the case. Under Rule 50(a), a party can move for a directed verdict after the opposing side has finished presenting its evidence, and again after all the evidence is in. Making that motion and losing does not cost anything -- the moving party can still put on its own case, and having moved does not waive the right to a jury trial even if both sides asked for a directed verdict. Every such motion has to spell out its specific grounds; a bare request without reasons is not enough. The rule has a nonjury counterpart too: in a bench trial, a party can challenge the sufficiency of the other side's evidence through a motion to dismiss the claim, at the same points in the trial and under the same specificity requirement.

Rule 50(b) picks up after the verdict. If a directed verdict motion made at the close of all the evidence is denied, or the court never rules on it, the case is treated as if it went to the jury subject to the court's later ruling on the legal questions the motion raised. That sets up the motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, commonly called JNOV: within ten days after judgment is entered (or, if no verdict came back, within ten days after the jury is discharged), a party who made the earlier directed-verdict motion can ask the court to set the verdict and judgment aside and enter judgment its way instead. A motion filed early, before judgment, is treated as filed the day after judgment comes down. And if the court sits on the motion for thirty days without ruling, the motion is deemed denied.

Because a losing verdict often makes a new trial attractive as a fallback, Rule 50(c) lets a party join a new-trial motion with the JNOV motion, or request one in the alternative. If the court grants JNOV, it also has to rule -- conditionally -- on whether it would grant a new trial if the JNOV judgment gets reversed on appeal, and state its reasons either way. That conditional ruling protects the party who lost on JNOV: if the appellate court reverses the JNOV, the conditionally granted new trial goes forward unless the appellate court says otherwise, and if the new-trial request was conditionally denied, the losing party can still challenge that denial on appeal. The party whose verdict got set aside by JNOV also gets its own fresh ten-day window to move for a new trial under Rule 59.

Rule 50(d) covers the flip side: if the JNOV motion is denied, the party who won that round can still argue, as the appellee, that it deserves a new trial if the appellate court decides the trial court was wrong to deny JNOV. And Rule 50(e) sets the preservation rule that trips up more appeals than any other part of this rule: a party without the burden of proof on a claim -- typically a defendant resisting the plaintiff's case -- has to move for a directed verdict on insufficient evidence at the close of all the evidence to preserve a sufficiency challenge for appeal. A party who carries the burden of proof does not need to make that motion to challenge, on appeal, a verdict that came out against it. And if a directed verdict motion is filed but never ruled on, it is deemed denied for purposes of getting appellate review on sufficiency.