Rule 2.612.Relief From Judgment or Order

Clerical mistakes in a judgment, order, or other part of the record, and errors from oversight or omission, can be corrected by the court at any time, on its own initiative or a party's motion, with notice if the court orders it; once an appeal is pending, the trial court's power to fix these errors runs through the appellate rules instead. A defendant over whom personal jurisdiction was properly acquired, but who never knew the case was pending, gets a full year after final judgment to enter an appearance and ask for relief, and the court can grant it, on payment of costs or other just conditions, so long as innocent third parties won't be prejudiced.

Beyond those two situations, a party can move for relief from a final judgment, order, or proceeding on a defined list of grounds: mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect; newly discovered evidence that diligence couldn't have turned up in time for a new-trial motion; fraud, misrepresentation, or other misconduct by an adverse party; a judgment that is void; a judgment already satisfied, released, discharged, or based on a since-reversed prior judgment, or one that's no longer equitable to keep enforcing prospectively; or any other reason justifying relief. The first three grounds carry a hard one-year deadline from the judgment, order, or proceeding; the rest just need to be raised within a reasonable time, and none of this generally pauses the judgment's finality while the motion is pending. The rule preserves three separate court powers alongside the motion itself: to entertain an independent action relieving a party from a judgment generally, to grant relief to a defendant who was never personally notified as subrule (B) describes, and to set aside a judgment for fraud on the court. And it retires the old common-law writs — coram vobis, audita querela, bills of review — in favor of a motion or an independent action as the only paths to this kind of relief.