§ 9-2-60.Dismissal for want of prosecution; costs; recommencement within six months

Georgia courts do not let dead cases sit on the docket forever. O.C.G.A. § 9-2-60 builds in a self-executing housekeeping rule: if five years pass on any action or proceeding without a single written order entered in it, the case stands dismissed automatically, without anyone filing a motion or a judge signing an order to make it happen. The costs of that dismissed case get taxed against the plaintiff, the party who brought it.

Subsection (a) widens what counts toward that five-year clock. An order of continuance counts as a qualifying order, so a case that keeps getting continued by court order stays alive under this statute even without other activity. The statute also stretches the word “proceedings” to reach an appeal from an award of assessors or a special master in a condemnation case, so those appeals face the same five-year exposure as an ordinary lawsuit.

Subsection (c) softens the blow of an automatic dismissal. A plaintiff who recommences the case within six months after this kind of dismissal gets to treat the new filing as standing on the same footing, for limitation purposes, as the original one. O.C.G.A. § 9-2-61 gives plaintiffs who dismiss their own cases voluntarily a comparable path back into court, though that companion statute measures its window as whichever period ends later — the original limitations deadline or six months after the dismissal — rather than a flat six months.