Standing Committee Approves Proposed Amendments to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
The Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure today approved the amendments submitted by the Civil Rules Advisory Committee addressing discovery of electronically stored information.
The proposed text of each rule was approved without change; some changes were made to the committee notes. The entire package of amendments will be posted here when available.
Further approval is still necessary before the rules go into effect. The Judicial Conference will consider the package at its September 20, 2005 meeting. Then, the Supreme Court will consider it for promulgation (probably by May 1, 2006). An effective date of December 1, 2006 is expected.
Thanks for the update.
The earliest the rules may become effective is December 1, 2006. Although the Rules are not yet effective, we expect they will soon be available on the Federal Rulemaking website (see http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/index.html), which contains information on proposed and pending changes to the rules. As noted in the post above, the Standing Committee has approved the Advisory Committee’s suggested amendments. The text of the proposed Rules approved by the Standing Committee is the same as contained in the Advisory Committee’s May 27 memo. Subsequent to issuing this memo, however, the Advisory Committee made some modifications to the Notes accompanying the Rules. As a result, the text of the Notes approved by the Standing Committee is not exactly the same as was set forth in the May 27 memo.