Most trial lawyers I talk to have the Minnesota post-trial sequence exactly backwards. They are careful — sometimes fanatical — about making a motion for judgment as a matter of law before the case goes to the jury, because they learned in federal court that skipping it forfeits the renewed motion. Then they take the verdict, wait for judgment, file a notice of appeal, and discover in the respondent’s brief that three of their four assignments of error are not reviewable at all.
Both halves of that are wrong, and they are wrong in opposite directions. Minnesota’s Rule 50.02 says in terms 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 motion everyone treats as optional is the one that matters.
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 that does not exist in the federal rule:
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 . . .
This is deliberate. When the Minnesota Supreme Court rewrote Rule 50 in 2006 to track the 1991 federal amendments and retire the language of directed verdicts and j.n.o.v., the advisory committee flagged this one point of divergence 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 is to the pre-2006 numbering; the operative language now sits in the body of Rule 50.02 with no subdivision letter. The substance survived the renumbering intact.
So the answer to the question a lot of Minnesota lawyers lose sleep over at the close of evidence is: move if you want the record, but your renewed motion does not die if you don’t.
That said, I make the pre-verdict motion anyway, and I make it specific, because 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 because a motion made and denied on the record at the close of evidence forces the district court to articulate why the evidence was sufficient. That articulation 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), such a 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. Note what subdivision (f) does: it makes an unobjected-to error of law reviewable only if it is “plainly assigned in the notice of motion,” and only where Rules 46 and 51 excused the objection in the first place. Note what subdivision (g) does in its second half: it strips the appellate presumption that a new trial was granted on evidentiary insufficiency unless the district court says so expressly. If I am the party who won a new trial, I want that sentence satisfied in the order.
Rule 59.02 confines 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 is not a rule about convenience. It is a rule about what you may put in front of the judge, and a post-trial motion that depends on material outside the trial record is a motion with a defect in it.
Rule 59.03 sets two deadlines. Lawyers calendar one of them.
Here is 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 things in one sentence, and each one is a trap.
First, the trigger is disjunctive, and it is not entry of judgment. For a jury case it is 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 is service of notice by a party of the filing. Judgment entry does not appear in the rule at all. I have watched perfectly competent counsel measure 30 days from the wrong event because they reached for the appellate rule’s trigger instead of the civil rule’s.
Second, service is the operative act, not filing. The rule says the notice of motion “shall be served” within 30 days. Filing follows under the General Rules of Practice.
Third, the motion must be heard within 60 days. Not scheduled — heard. And the only extension the rule permits is one granted by the court within that 60-day window, for good cause shown. A court cannot extend a hearing date on day 70. Rule 6.02, which is the general enlargement rule and is otherwise generous, 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 carefully. Rule 59.03 is on the no-enlargement list, and the only enlargement available is the one Rule 59.03 itself supplies — the good-cause extension of the hearing date, granted inside 60 days. There is no mechanism at all to enlarge the 30-day service period. Not stipulation, not excusable neglect, not the district court’s inherent authority. If you serve on day 31, you have not filed a late motion; you have filed nothing.
Two calendar entries, then, 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 one is harder than the first, and that is 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 differs, and so does 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 losing side of 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 is one clock.
The conditional ruling nobody asks for
Rule 50.03(a) is a small provision with outsized value, and in my experience it is almost never invoked 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 is mandatory language directed 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 is not 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 ask for 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 the whole reason the rest of the article matters, and the answer is not a matter of custom. It is a holding.
In Sauter v. Wasemiller, 389 N.W.2d 200 (Minn. 1986), the plaintiff lost a medical negligence verdict, skipped a 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 affirmed the court of appeals’ holding that those assignments were not 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). The court then said why, and the reasoning is worth reading because it 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. Timely objection is necessary and not sufficient. You must object and assign the error in the motion.
There is no general “question of law” exception. The court of appeals had built one, and the supreme court demolished it 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), fixed the court of appeals’ over-reading of Tyroll. Alpha lost a bench trial on lease interpretation and an anti-kickback question, took no post-trial motion, and the court of appeals confined itself to the narrow Gruenhagen scope. The supreme court reversed that limitation:
[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 explicitly: “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, do not.
And the narrow scope, when it applies, is genuinely 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. That is your appeal if you skipped the motion and your issue is not a substantive question of law: 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 final 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 stated 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. A rule that has to be amended to warn the bar about a problem is a rule describing a problem that is still happening.
Bench trials get one break, and it is 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 is 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 preserves: sufficiency of the evidence to support the findings. That is one of the two questions Gruenhagen already leaves you. It does not preserve an evidentiary ruling, a discovery sanction, or the court’s refusal to reopen the record. If you tried a case to the bench and your complaint is about how the trial was conducted 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 systems interlock and the interlock is unforgiving. 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 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 — filed “just in case” while the post-trial motion is pending — is a nullity, and a new notice must 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), as 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
I calendar four dates before I do anything else: 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 the three I think are strongest. Sauter does not grade the motion on elegance. It asks whether the matter was “assigned as error.”
Then I separate the two categories. Discretionary trial rulings go in the motion or they are gone. Substantive questions of law that were briefed and decided below survive under Alpha Real Estate whether or not I move — but I put them in anyway, because the cost of including a preserved issue is a paragraph, and the cost of guessing wrong about which side of the Alpha line an issue falls on is the issue.
Post-trial motions also intersect with the money. 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 arithmetic of a judgment you are 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 rather than after trial, Rule 59 is the wrong instrument entirely; that is 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.
In short: the pre-verdict motion is a courtesy to the record, and 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.