When Will I Get the Decision?
Our clients often ask this question about appeals before the Law Court. And so we decided it was time to look at what the data say. Our summer associate, and part-time blogger, Sage Shaheen thoroughly reviewed the information available and, while her findings are interesting, what is perhaps more illuminating about this exercise is what it reveals about the nuances of Law Court practice and, ultimately, the difficulty of reducing the question to pure mathematics.
A word about nomenclature at the outset. Rule 12(c) of the Maine Rules of Appellate Procedure states as follows: “Decisions of the Law Court may be reported by several methods, including a signed opinion, a per curiam opinion, or a memorandum of decision. A memorandum of decision decides an appeal but does not establish precedent and will not be published as an opinion of the Court in the Maine Reporter.” The practice of the Law Court, as guided by the foregoing, is thus to hand down two types of opinions: “published decisions,” which may be issued per curiam or authored by a single justice, and “memoranda of decision,” also known as “mem decs,” which, although not designated as such, function like per curiam opinions in that they are typically issued by the entire Court and not signed by any single justice. (Side note: If you have not done so already, you should sign up for the emails sent by the Law Court clerk circulating decisions. You can do so here.)
There is no rules-based connection between the types of decisions the Court may issue, as described above, and the Court’s decision to hold oral argument: published decisions may have been considered “on the briefs” (i.e., not given oral argument) and mem decs may have been argued. In practice, a substantial majority of published decisions are issued after oral argument and a substantial majority of mem decs are issued after consideration on the briefs.
And that brings us to the data, Sage’s methodology, and some of the barriers this exercise quickly encounters.
Sage reviewed every published decision issued in 2025 and sought to measure the length of time between (a) when the Law Court either held oral argument or took the case under consideration on the briefs and (b) when the Court issued its decision.
We recognize it may, at first glance, seem more useful if we had identified the date of the filing of each notice of appeal and measured the time from that date to the date of a decision. But notices of appeal are, of course, filed in the applicable trial court (dockets for which are not easily or at least quickly accessed), and the Law Court’s decisions do not identify the date on which they are filed. Moreover, like trial court litigation, appeals encounter motion practice, stays, or other procedural events that delay consideration of the case, while some cases receive expedited consideration due to relevant exigencies. In short, even if we had access to data showing notice of appeal filing dates, identifying that date alone does not always signify the date on which a case truly gets moving in the Law Court.
Sage did not include mem decs in her analysis for the same reason. Because the vast majority of mem decs are not argued, and because we cannot readily identify when the notice of appeal was filed in those cases, we have no readily-available start date from which to measure.
With all of those caveats, here is what Sage found:
The Law Court issued 98 published decisions in 2025. The Law Court held oral argument in 79 of those cases, such that approximately 80% of 2025 published decisions received oral argument. The average time to decision from either the date of oral argument or the date the Law Court took the case on the briefs was 162 days. The median time, however, was considerably shorter: 106 days. The delta between the mean and the median was substantially impacted by the Law Court’s decision in State of Maine v. Derric McLain, a notable criminal case concerning the privilege against self-incrimination that featured amicus briefing, received two separate oral arguments, and ultimately required 998 days from the second argument to decide.
So, when will you get your decision?
I hate to say it but … it depends.
