Rule 1.1008.Conditional rulings on grant of motion

After a jury verdict, a losing party often has two different complaints: the verdict should never have stood at all, or, failing that, the trial should be run again. Rule 1.1008(1) lets a party raise both without penalty — filing a motion under rule 1.1003 (judgment notwithstanding the verdict) does not waive the right to also file or rely on a motion under rule 1.1004 (new trial). Rule 1.1008(2) gives the party whose verdict was set aside a fifteen-day window after entry of the judgment notwithstanding the verdict to file its own new-trial motion.

The heart of the rule is rule 1.1008(3), which solves a real problem: if the court grants judgment notwithstanding the verdict, what happens to a pending new-trial motion? The court must rule on it anyway, conditionally — deciding whether a new trial should be granted if the judgment is later vacated or reversed on appeal, and stating the grounds either way. That conditional ruling does not affect the finality of the judgment being appealed, so the case moves up on appeal in a normal posture.

The payoff comes if the appellate court reverses. If the trial court had conditionally granted a new trial, the new trial proceeds automatically unless the appellate court orders otherwise. If the trial court had conditionally denied one, the party who wanted the new trial can argue on appeal that the denial was wrong, and the appellate court's ruling controls what happens next. This structure means the case doesn't have to bounce back down for a fresh new-trial ruling every time an appellate court reverses a judgment notwithstanding the verdict.