Rule 36.9.Identification

Rule 36.9 gives every case a fingerprint. Whatever the matter — civil, criminal, adoption, or something else — it gets identified by a fixed sequence: year of filing, type of case, consecutive case number, and, where the case calls for it, the assigned judge. Put a matter’s identifiers in that order and you get its case number as it appears on the docket and in the file.

This is the piece of Rule 36 that turns the three broad file categories in Rule 36.8 into something searchable. Anyone who knows a case’s year, type, and number can pull the right file without ambiguity, even in a courthouse handling thousands of matters across multiple categories and judges. The sequence also builds in a record of when a case started and which division of the court it belongs to.

Consistency here matters because so much else depends on it — docketing under Rule 36.2, the caption on every pleading under Rule 36.3, and cross-references between related files, as in the remittitur filings addressed by Rule 38, all rely on cases being identified the same way every time.