Rule 74.06.Relief From Judgment or Order.

Once a judgment is final, Missouri law still leaves several doors open for undoing it, and Rule 74.06 is where those doors live. It is Missouri's counterpart to the federal rule allowing relief from a final judgment, and it separates two distinct situations: honest clerical slips, and substantive grounds for reopening a judgment altogether.

Subsection (a) handles the easy case. Clerical mistakes in a judgment, order, or other part of the record — including errors from oversight or omission — can be corrected by the court at any time, on its own initiative or on a party's motion, with whatever notice the court orders. Even during an appeal, the trial court can fix these mistakes with the appellate court's leave.

Subsection (b) is the heart of the rule. On motion and on terms the court finds just, a party can be relieved from a final judgment or order for five reasons: (1) mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect; (2) fraud — whether traditionally called intrinsic or extrinsic — misrepresentation, or other misconduct by an adverse party; (3) the judgment is irregular; (4) the judgment is void; or (5) the judgment has been satisfied, released, or discharged, or a judgment it depended on has been reversed or vacated, or it is no longer equitable for the judgment to remain in force. These grounds map closely onto the federal Rule 60(b) analysis, and Missouri practitioners often call a motion under this rule a "60(b)" motion or a motion to set aside judgment.

Timing matters and it is not uniform across the five grounds. Filing the motion never by itself affects the judgment's finality or suspends its operation — the judgment still stands unless and until the court grants relief. For grounds (1), (2), and (3) — mistake or excusable neglect, fraud or misconduct, and an irregular judgment — the motion must come within a reasonable time and no later than one year after the judgment or order was entered. Grounds (4) and (5) — a void judgment, or one that has been satisfied or is no longer equitable — carry no one-year outer limit; they need only be raised within a reasonable time, reflecting the reality that a void judgment or a satisfied debt can surface as an issue long after entry. The motion and a hearing notice must be served on the parties to the judgment under Rule 54.

Finally, subsection (d) preserves the court's power to entertain a separate independent action to relieve a party from a judgment or to set aside a judgment for fraud upon the court, while abolishing a set of old common-law writs — coram nobis, coram vobis, audita querela, and bills of review — so that a motion under this rule or an independent action are now the only paths to that relief.