13-204.Contribution and indemnity.

This section sets the deadline for contribution and indemnity claims, and the trigger date depends on whether an underlying lawsuit was ever filed. If no underlying action was filed by the claimant, the party seeking contribution or indemnity has 2 years from the date it made the payment discharging its liability to that claimant. If an underlying action was filed, the 2 years runs from being served with process in that action, or from when the party knew or should reasonably have known of the act or omission giving rise to the contribution or indemnity claim, whichever period expires later.

Subsection (c) makes this the controlling deadline for contribution and indemnity claims specifically, preempting other statutes of limitation or repose that might otherwise apply — but only to the extent the underlying claimant could have timely sued the party from whom contribution or indemnity is sought at the time the underlying claim was filed, or, where no underlying action was filed, the payment was made before that underlying claim would have been time-barred.

Two more limits apply. The section, as amended in 1994, applies retroactively to substantively affected pending actions, without regard to when the cause of action accrued, but doesn't disturb limitations or repose rights that had already fully vested before that amendment's effective date. And the entire section carves out contribution or indemnity sought from a party alleged to have been negligent in medical or other healing-art malpractice — that claim follows a different limitations track.