Most trial lawyers I talk to have the Minnesota post-trial sequence exactly backwards. They’re careful, sometimes fanatical, about moving for judgment as a matter of law before the case goes to the jury, because federal court taught them that skipping it kills the renewed motion. Then they take the verdict, wait for judgment, file a notice of appeal, and find out from the respondent’s brief that three of their four assignments of error can’t be reviewed at all.
They’ve got both halves wrong, in opposite directions. Minnesota’s Rule 50.02 says in so many words that the pre-verdict motion is not a precondition to the post-verdict one. Minnesota’s Rule 59.03, read with Sauter v. Wasemiller, is the motion that decides whether you have an appeal worth taking. The motion everyone guards is optional. The one everyone treats as optional is the one that counts.
Do I have to move for judgment as a matter of law before the case goes to the jury?
No. Not in Minnesota state court. Rule 50.02 opens the door with a clause the federal rule doesn’t have:
If, for any reason, the court does not grant a motion for judgment as a matter of law made during trial, the court is considered to have submitted the action to the jury subject to the court’s later deciding the legal questions raised by the motion. Whether or not the party has moved for judgment as a matter of law before submission of the case to the jury, a party may make or renew a request for judgment as a matter of law by serving a motion within the time specified in Rule 59 for the service of a motion for a new trial . . .
That’s on purpose. When the Minnesota Supreme Court rewrote Rule 50 in 2006 to track the 1991 federal amendments and retire the old language of directed verdicts and j.n.o.v., the advisory committee flagged this one difference and kept it:
Minnesota practice differs from federal practice in one important respect — former Fed. R. Civ. P. 50 did not have the express provision of Minn. R. Civ. P. 50.02(a) allowing a motion for judgment n.o.v. to be brought “whether or not the party has moved for a directed verdict,” and the current version of Fed. R. Civ. P. 50 lacks equivalent language with regard to motions for judgment as a matter of law.
Minn. R. Civ. P. 50, Advisory Comm. Cmt. — 2006 Amend. The committee’s cross-reference uses the pre-2006 numbering. The operative language now sits in the body of Rule 50.02 with no subdivision letter. The substance came through the renumbering intact.
So here’s the answer to the question a lot of Minnesota lawyers lose sleep over at the close of evidence: move if you want the record, but your renewed motion doesn’t die if you don’t.
I make the pre-verdict motion anyway, and I make it specific. Rule 50.01(b) requires it to “specify the judgment sought and the law and the facts on which the moving party is entitled to the judgment,” and a motion made and denied on the record at the close of evidence forces the district court to say why the evidence was enough. That explanation is worth more on appeal than the motion itself. The standard is the familiar one:
If during a trial by jury a party has been fully heard on an issue and there is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find for that party on that issue, the court may decide the issue against that party and may grant a motion for judgment as a matter of law against that party with respect to a claim or defense that cannot under the controlling law be maintained or defeated without a favorable finding on that issue.
Minn. R. Civ. P. 50.01(a). Under Rule 50.01(b), the motion “may be made at any time before submission of the case to the jury.”
The seven grounds for a new trial, and why you should plead them by letter
Rule 59.01 is a closed list. A new trial may be granted “for any of the following causes”:
(a) Irregularity in the proceedings of the court, referee, jury, or prevailing party, or any order or abuse of discretion, whereby the moving party was deprived of a fair trial;
(b) Misconduct of the jury or prevailing party;
(c) Accident or surprise which could not have been prevented by ordinary prudence;
(d) Material evidence newly discovered, which with reasonable diligence could not have been found and produced at the trial;
(e) Excessive or insufficient damages, appearing to have been given under the influence of passion or prejudice;
(f) Errors of law occurring at the trial, and objected to at the time or, if no objection need have been made pursuant to Rules 46 and 51, plainly assigned in the notice of motion;
(g) The verdict, decision, or report is not justified by the evidence, or is contrary to law; but, unless it be so expressly stated in the order granting a new trial, it shall not be presumed, on appeal, to have been made on the ground that the verdict, decision, or report was not justified by the evidence.
Seven causes. Look at subdivision (f). An error of law nobody objected to is reviewable only if it’s “plainly assigned in the notice of motion,” and only where Rules 46 and 51 excused the objection in the first place. Look at the back half of subdivision (g). It strips the appellate presumption that a new trial was granted for evidentiary insufficiency unless the district court says so expressly. If I’m the party who won a new trial, I want that sentence satisfied in the order.
Rule 59.02 limits the motion to “the files, exhibits, and minutes of the court,” with facts outside the minutes shown by affidavit and a full or partial transcript available at the hearing. That’s not a convenience rule. It’s a rule about what you’re allowed to put in front of the judge, and a post-trial motion that leans on material outside the trial record has a hole in it.
Rule 59.03 sets two deadlines. Lawyers calendar one of them.
Here’s the sentence that ends more appeals than any evidentiary ruling ever has:
A notice of motion for a new trial shall be served within 30 days after a general verdict or service of notice by a party of the filing of the decision or order; and the motion shall be heard within 60 days after such general verdict or notice of filing, unless the time for hearing be extended by the court within the 60-day period for good cause shown.
Minn. R. Civ. P. 59.03. Three traps in one sentence.
The trigger runs two ways, and neither one is entry of judgment. In a jury case it’s the general verdict. The clock starts the day the jury reports, not the day the court administrator enters judgment weeks later. For a court decision or order, it’s service of notice by a party of the filing. Entry of judgment isn’t in the rule at all. I’ve watched perfectly competent counsel count 30 days from the wrong event because they grabbed the appellate rule’s trigger instead of the civil rule’s.
Service is what counts, not filing. The rule says the notice of motion “shall be served” within 30 days. Filing follows under the General Rules of Practice.
The motion has to be heard within 60 days. Not scheduled. Heard. And the only extension the rule allows is one the court grants within that 60-day window, for good cause shown. A court can’t extend a hearing date on day 70. Rule 6.02, the general enlargement rule, is otherwise generous, and it carves this rule out by name:
but it may not extend the time for taking any action under Rules 4.043, 59.03, 59.05, and 60.02 except to the extent and under the conditions stated in them.
Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.02. Read that slowly. Rule 59.03 is on the no-enlargement list, and the only enlargement you get is the one Rule 59.03 itself supplies: the good-cause extension of the hearing date, granted inside 60 days. There’s no way at all to enlarge the 30-day service period. Not by stipulation, not by excusable neglect, not by the district court’s inherent authority. Serve on day 31, and you haven’t filed a late motion. You’ve filed nothing.
So you make two calendar entries the day the verdict comes in: day 30 for service, and a hearing date on the court’s calendar inside day 60. In busy counties the second is harder to get than the first, and that’s exactly why I call the assignment clerk before I draft the motion, not after.
Which post-trial motion do I actually file?
They stack, and Rule 50.02 expressly contemplates joining them. A party “may alternatively request a new trial or join a motion for a new trial under Rule 59.” The relief is different, and so is the audience.
| Motion | Rule | Deadline | What you are asking for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Judgment as a matter of law during trial | 50.01 | Any time before submission to the jury | Take the issue from the jury |
| Renewed judgment as a matter of law | 50.02 | Served within Rule 59.03’s 30 days | Enter judgment for you notwithstanding the verdict |
| New trial | 59.01 | Served within 30 days; heard within 60 | Try the case again, on all issues or some |
| Amended or additional findings | 52.02 | “[S]erved and heard not later than the times allowed” under 59.03 | Fix the findings in a bench trial |
Rule 50.03(b) closes the loop for the side that lost a Rule 50 ruling: any Rule 59 motion by a party against whom judgment as a matter of law is rendered “shall be served and heard within the times specified in Rule 59.” Everything post-trial runs on the Rule 59.03 clock. There’s one clock.
The conditional ruling nobody asks for
Rule 50.03(a) is a small provision that’s worth a lot, and in my experience almost nobody asks for it from the podium. When the district court grants judgment as a matter of law, it “shall also rule on the motion for a new trial, if any, by determining whether it should be granted if the judgment is thereafter vacated or reversed, and shall specify the grounds for granting or denying the motion for the new trial.”
That’s mandatory language aimed at the judge, and it protects the party who won the JML. If the conditional grant is in the order and the appellate court reverses the judgment, “the new trial shall proceed unless the appellate court has otherwise ordered.” If it isn’t in the order, the winner spends a remand arguing about what should have been decided two years earlier. When I win a Rule 50 motion, I put the conditional ruling in the proposed order. It costs a paragraph.
What will an appellate court refuse to look at if I never moved for a new trial?
This is why everything else in this article matters, and the answer isn’t a matter of custom. It’s a holding.
In Sauter v. Wasemiller, 389 N.W.2d 200 (Minn. 1986), the plaintiff lost a medical negligence verdict, skipped the new-trial motion, and appealed from the judgment, assigning errors in evidentiary rulings and jury instructions. The supreme court took the case on its supervisory powers specifically to settle the question, and it affirmed the court of appeals’ holding that those assignments weren’t reviewable:
It has long been the general rule that matters such as trial procedure, evidentiary rulings and jury instructions are subject to appellate review only if there has been a motion for a new trial in which such matters have been assigned as error.
Id. at 201, citing Heise v. J.R. Clark Co., 245 Minn. 179, 191, 71 N.W.2d 818, 826 (1955). Then the court explained why, and the explanation tells you what a good post-trial motion looks like. The motion “provides both trial court and counsel with a unique opportunity to eliminate the need for appellate review or to more fully develop critical aspects of the record,” forces counsel “to focus the trial court’s attention on the specifics of an objection which, though properly framed during trial, might not have been fully explained,” and gives the court “the opportunity to correct its own errors.” Id. at 201–02. The holding:
We therefore reaffirm the general rule that in order to preserve for appellate review issues arising during the course of trial, counsel — in addition to taking the other requisite steps, including making timely objection — must move the trial court for a new trial . . .
Id. at 202. A timely objection is necessary, and it isn’t enough. You have to object and assign the error in the motion.
There’s no general “question of law” exception. The court of appeals had built one, and the supreme court tore it down in Tyroll v. Private Label Chemicals, Inc., 505 N.W.2d 54 (Minn. 1993):
With a little ingenuity, most questions can be converted into so-called “questions of law”; if the exception were to be allowed, it would soon swallow up Sauter.
Id. at 57. Contrary court of appeals decisions were overruled. Tyroll did review the appellant’s jury-trial issue, but on a narrow ground: the right to a jury trial is sui generis, because “the jury trial is more than a procedural matter; it defines the basic nature of the decisionmaking process itself.” Id.
What survives without a new-trial motion is substantive law that was actually litigated below. Alpha Real Estate Co. of Rochester v. Delta Dental Plan of Minnesota, 664 N.W.2d 303 (Minn. 2003), corrected the court of appeals’ over-reading of Tyroll. Alpha lost a bench trial on lease interpretation and an anti-kickback question and made no post-trial motion, so the court of appeals held itself to the narrow Gruenhagen scope. The supreme court reversed that limit:
[W]e conclude that, while permissive, motions for a new trial pursuant to Minn. R. Civ. P. 59.01 are not a prerequisite for appellate review of substantive questions of law when a genuine issue of law is properly raised and considered at the district court level.
Id. at 311. The court drew the line in so many words: “a general demarcation line can be drawn as to when post-trial motions are required for assignments of error relating to the conduct of the trial that reside within the district courts’ discretion and substantive questions of law.” Id. at 310. Discretionary trial conduct needs the motion. Pure questions of law, briefed and decided below, don’t.
And when the narrow scope applies, it really is narrow. Gruenhagen v. Larson, 310 Minn. 454, 246 N.W.2d 565 (1976), states it:
Equally well established is the rule that on appeal from a judgment where there has been no motion for a new trial the only questions for review are whether the evidence sustains the findings of fact and whether such findings sustain the conclusions of law and the judgment.
Id. at 458, 246 N.W.2d at 569. If you skipped the motion and your issue isn’t a substantive question of law, that’s your whole appeal: whether the findings hold up the judgment. Nothing about the trial itself.
The appellate rule now says the same thing out loud. Rule 103.04 was amended in 1999 to add a last sentence to what had been a broad grant of reviewing power:
The scope of review afforded may be affected by whether proper steps have been taken to preserve issues for review on appeal, including the existence of timely and proper post-trial motions.
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 103.04. The advisory committee’s reason was blunt: “Litigants often fail to recognize the importance of post-trial motions, and the sometimes dramatic failure to bring them.” Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 103.04, Advisory Comm. Cmt. — 1998 Amends. When a rule has to be amended to warn the bar about a problem, the problem is still happening.
Bench trials get one break, and it’s smaller than it sounds
Rule 52.01 says “[r]equests for findings are not necessary for purposes of review,” and Rule 52.02 ends with a carve-out that gets cited more often than it gets read:
When findings of fact are made in actions tried by the court without a jury, the question of the sufficiency of the evidence to support the findings may thereafter be raised whether or not the party raising the question has made in the district court an objection to such findings or has made a motion to amend them or a motion for judgment.
Minn. R. Civ. P. 52.02. Read what that saves: sufficiency of the evidence to support the findings. That’s one of the two questions Gruenhagen already leaves you. It doesn’t save an evidentiary ruling, a discovery sanction, or the court’s refusal to reopen the record. If you tried the case to the bench and your complaint is about how the trial was run rather than whether the evidence supports the findings, you still need the Rule 59 motion.
Rule 52.02’s own vehicle, a motion to amend findings or make additional findings, is worth filing on its own terms when a finding is wrong or missing. It runs on the Rule 59.03 clock: “served and heard not later than the times allowed for a motion for new trial pursuant to Rule 59.03.”
The motion that saves your appeal can also void your notice of appeal
One last mechanical point, because the two sets of rules lock together and the lock doesn’t forgive. Under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 104.01, subd. 2, a proper and timely motion under Rule 50.02, Rule 52.02, Rule 59, or Rule 60 (if filed within the new-trial window) resets the appeal clock for every party, running from service of notice of filing of the order disposing of the last such motion. Good. But here’s subdivision 3:
A notice of appeal filed before the disposition of any of the above motions is premature and of no effect, and does not divest the trial court of jurisdiction to dispose of the motion.
So the protective notice of appeal, the one filed “just in case” while the post-trial motion is pending, is a nullity, and a new notice has to be filed after the order issues. The order denying a new trial is itself independently appealable under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 103.03(d), and so is an order granting one where the court states expressly that it rests exclusively on errors of law and specifies them. Our article on Minnesota appeal deadlines and what is actually appealable works through the 60-day clock in detail.
What I do the week after a verdict
Before anything else, I calendar four dates: day 30 from the verdict for service, a hearing date inside day 60, day 60 from entry of judgment for the notice of appeal, and a drafting deadline a week before service. Then I write the motion against Rule 59.01’s list, subdivision by subdivision, and I assign every error I might ever want to argue, not just the three I think are strongest. Sauter doesn’t grade the motion on elegance. It asks whether the matter was “assigned as error.”
Then I sort the two kinds. Discretionary trial rulings go in the motion or they’re gone. Substantive questions of law that were briefed and decided below survive under Alpha Real Estate whether I move or not. I put them in anyway. Including a preserved issue costs a paragraph. Guessing wrong about which side of the Alpha line an issue falls on costs the issue.
Post-trial motions touch the money, too. Costs, disbursements, and interest are all sensitive to what happens in the 30 days after a verdict, and a Rule 68 offer made months earlier can change the math on a judgment you’re about to appeal. See Minnesota offers of judgment under Rule 68 and § 549.09 and how prejudgment and postjudgment interest actually accrue on a Minnesota verdict. If the judgment against your client was entered by default instead of after trial, Rule 59 is the wrong tool entirely. That’s Rule 60.02 territory. And if punitive damages were in the case, remember that Minnesota required leave to plead them in the first place. The § 549.191 motion is a separate gate with its own record.
The pre-verdict motion is a courtesy to the record. The post-verdict motion is the appeal.
Madgett Law, LLC tries civil cases in Minnesota district courts and handles the post-trial and appellate work that follows them. We are retained after verdicts by clients and by other lawyers to build the Rule 50, 52, and 59 record within the 30-day window and to take the appeal from there. If a verdict came in against you and the clock is running, call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.
Sources: Minn. R. Civ. P. 50.01(a) (judgment-as-a-matter-of-law standard), 50.01(b) (timing and content of the pre-submission motion), 50.02 (renewed motion available “[w]hether or not the party has moved” pre-submission; alternative or joined new-trial request; service within the Rule 59 time), 50.03(a) (mandatory conditional ruling on the new-trial motion; effect on reversal), 50.03(b) (Rule 59 timing applies to the losing party’s new-trial motion), and Advisory Committee Comment — 2006 Amendment (express divergence from Fed. R. Civ. P. 50); Minn. R. Civ. P. 59.01(a)–(g) (grounds for a new trial), 59.02 (files, exhibits, and minutes; affidavits; transcript), 59.03 (service within 30 days of a general verdict or service of notice of filing; hearing within 60 days; good-cause extension only within the 60-day period); Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.02 (no enlargement of time under Rule 59.03 except as stated in that rule); Minn. R. Civ. P. 52.01 (requests for findings unnecessary for review), 52.02 (amended or additional findings on the Rule 59.03 clock; sufficiency of the evidence preserved in court trials without objection or motion); Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 103.03(d) (appealability of orders denying or granting a new trial), 103.04 (scope of review affected by preservation, including timely and proper post-trial motions) and Advisory Committee Comment — 1998 Amendments, 104.01, subd. 2 (post-decision motions that restart the appeal period), subd. 3 (a notice of appeal filed before disposition is premature and of no effect); Sauter v. Wasemiller, 389 N.W.2d 200, 201–02 (Minn. 1986) (trial procedure, evidentiary rulings, and jury instructions reviewable only if assigned as error in a new-trial motion; rationale; holding at 202); Heise v. J.R. Clark Co., 245 Minn. 179, 191, 71 N.W.2d 818, 826 (1955), as cited in Sauter (long-standing general rule); Tyroll v. Private Label Chemicals, Inc., 505 N.W.2d 54, 56–57 (Minn. 1993) (rejecting a general question-of-law exception; jury-trial right reviewable as sui generis); Alpha Real Estate Co. of Rochester v. Delta Dental Plan of Minnesota, 664 N.W.2d 303, 310–11 (Minn. 2003) (Sauter does not bar review of substantive questions of law properly raised and considered below; demarcation between discretionary trial conduct and questions of law); Gruenhagen v. Larson, 310 Minn. 454, 458, 246 N.W.2d 565, 569 (1976) (scope of review on appeal from a judgment with no new-trial motion).
This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied. Deadlines in this article are jurisdictional in effect and fact-specific in application; consult a lawyer about your own case.