Rule 83.01.Transfer Upon Application Prior to Disposition by Court of Appeals.

Rule 83.01 covers the earliest possible point at which the Supreme Court can take over a case pending in the court of appeals: before that court has decided anything. The Supreme Court can act on its own, without any party asking, or a party can file an application asking for the case to move up. Either way, the case has to still be undecided in the court of appeals — once an opinion or order comes down, a different rule (83.02) governs.

A party who wants this early transfer has ten days from the filing of the record on appeal in the court of appeals to file the application in the Supreme Court. The grounds mirror those in Rule 83.02 — general interest or importance of a question, or the need to reexamine existing law — but the rule adds a second, purely administrative reason: transfer can happen just to spread the workload more evenly across the court of appeals districts and the Supreme Court.

Filing an application under this rule does not pause the briefing schedule already running in the court of appeals unless the Supreme Court says otherwise. That matters because parties sometimes keep drafting and filing briefs while the transfer request is pending. If the transfer is granted, the rule tells everyone what happens to that work: briefs already filed in the court of appeals count as filed in the Supreme Court, and any brief not yet filed on the date of the transfer order gets filed directly in the Supreme Court, on the same schedule that would have applied had no transfer occurred.

The Supreme Court can also order the court of appeals record forwarded to it while it considers whether to grant the application, so the transfer decision itself does not have to wait for the full record to arrive through some other channel.