Rule 62.01.Case Management Conferences.

Rule 62.01 gives a court a structured way to get ahead of a case before trial. On its own motion or on a party’s motion, the court can direct the parties to appear for a case management conference addressing a wide range of topics: simplifying the issues in dispute, whether the pleadings need amending and how much time that would take, obtaining admissions of fact or of documents to avoid unnecessary proof at trial, limiting the number of expert witnesses, referring issues to a master for jury-trial findings, and setting the sequence and timing of discovery. The conference can also fix when experts must be disclosed, when documents a retained expert prepared, reviewed, or received must be turned over, whether and how much of a retained expert’s publications must be disclosed, and whether an expert must disclose prior deposition or trial testimony or reports prepared under a federal or equivalent state expert-disclosure rule — along with any other matter that would help move the case along.

Whatever the court decides at the conference gets captured in an order that recites the action taken, and that order controls how the rest of the case proceeds unless the court later modifies it to prevent manifest injustice. The rule also lets a court establish, by local rule, a standing pretrial calendar for placing civil actions on a track toward trial, and that calendar can be confined to jury cases, non-jury cases, or extended to every civil action.