Case Management

PLA 2201Activity 12·10 min read

Why it Matters

Once a lawsuit is filed, a clock starts running, and the court, not the parties, controls it. In January 2025 the Florida Supreme Court rewrote Rule 1.200 to require active case management in every civil case: each case gets a track and a case management order with firm deadlines from the outset, and each circuit’s chief judge decides by administrative order how that system runs locally. That means the same auto negligence case can move on different paperwork and different timelines depending on the circuit where it lands. Professionals who can find the governing orders and turn them into deadlines the team works from keep cases alive; missed case management deadlines can cost a client the trial date or the case itself. This activity has you do that work with the real orders two Florida circuits use right now, with a look at how federal courts handle the same problem.

Current Context

Both court systems now count the same thing, and both publish the count. The Administrative Office’s Civil Justice Reform Act report for March 31, 2026 shows 85,476 civil cases pending more than three years in the federal district courts, down about 2 percent from six months earlier, with 74,465 of them consolidated in multidistrict litigation, alongside 9,593 motions pending more than six months, up 3 percent. Compiled from CM/ECF and broken out by individual judge under 28 U.S.C. § 476, the report also requires each district to supply a status code explaining why each matter has sat. Florida wrote a version of the same discipline into its rules: Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.250(b) requires each circuit’s chief judge to serve on the chief justice and the state courts administrator an annual report listing every active civil case pending three years or more, judge by judge, which you can read in Chapter 2 on The Florida Bar’s rules page. That three-year line is what the case management order you build in Part 4 exists to keep a case from crossing, which is the reason the deadlines you calculate are the mechanism rather than the paperwork.

Key Concepts

Case Management Order

A court order, entered early in a civil case, that sets the deadlines controlling the case: service, adding parties, discovery cutoffs, motion deadlines, and a projected trial period. Under the rewritten Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200, every non-exempt civil case must receive one, and its deadlines are strictly enforced.

Administrative Order

A directive issued by a chief judge governing how courts in that circuit operate, as opposed to an order deciding a specific case. Rule 1.200 requires each circuit’s chief judge to address case management by administrative order, which is why case management practice differs from circuit to circuit.

Differentiated Case Management

The system, mandatory in Florida since January 1, 2025, that assigns every civil case to a streamlined, general, or complex track within 120 days of filing. The track determines how much discovery the case is expected to need and how quickly it should reach trial.

Judicial Circuit

Florida’s trial courts are organized into twenty judicial circuits, each covering one or more counties. The Seventh Circuit covers Volusia, Flagler, Putnam, and St. Johns Counties; the Fifteenth covers Palm Beach County. Circuits share statewide rules but adopt their own administrative orders and local practices.

Clerk of Court

The elected official who maintains the court file and docket in every case. Clerk offices run the public case search portals you will use in this activity, and in some circuits the clerk also issues the uniform case management order at filing.

Docketing and Calendaring

The practice of recording every deadline and court date from the rules and orders in a case into a firm’s calendar system, with reminders in advance of each date. It is how legal teams turn a case management order into daily work, and it is a core defense against blown deadlines.

Scheduling Order

The federal counterpart to Florida’s case management order, governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(b). The federal judge issues it after the parties confer and file a case management report, so the parties help propose the schedule, where in Florida circuits the deadlines often arrive by uniform order at filing.

Continuance

The postponement of a trial date or other deadline. Under amended Florida Rules 1.200 and 1.460, continuances are disfavored and require good cause, so the deadlines in a case management order are commitments rather than suggestions.

Resources

Florida Rules of Court Procedure (Current text of Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.200, 1.201, and 1.460, the statewide rules behind every case management order; use Chapter 1.)
Rule 16, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (The federal scheduling order rule you will contrast with Florida’s Rule 1.200 approach.)
Middle District of Florida Local Rule 3.02 (How Volusia County’s federal district court runs case management: the parties file a case management report before the judge issues a scheduling order.)
Seventh Judicial Circuit Administrative Orders (The searchable administrative order database for the circuit that includes Volusia County.)
Seventh Judicial Circuit Order CV-2024-023-SC, Case Management of Civil Cases (The Seventh Circuit’s governing case management order, with its Uniform Case Management Order attached as Exhibit A.)
Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Civil Differentiated Case Management Forms and Orders (The Fifteenth Circuit’s DCM page, including Administrative Order 3.110 and its uniform DCMO practice.)
Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Administrative Orders (Full administrative order library for the Palm Beach County circuit.)
Volusia County Clerk of the Circuit Court, Search Court Records (The case inquiry portal where you will pull real case management orders from Seventh Circuit files.)
Palm Beach County Clerk, Circuit Civil Court (The Fifteenth Circuit clerk’s civil division page, with links to case records and DCM information.)

What to Do

This activity builds the skill of locating the orders that actually govern a case’s deadlines and translating them into a schedule a legal team can work from. You will research how two Florida circuits manage the same new lawsuit, pull real documents from live court and clerk sites, and report your findings in a memo.

Here is your assignment. Treat the quoted instructions as coming from the supervising attorney:

“We’ve just taken on a new auto negligence case filed today. I want to know how case management and pretrial deadlines would look in two circuits: the Seventh Judicial Circuit (Volusia, Flagler, Putnam, and St. Johns Counties) and the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit (Palm Beach County). Compare how each circuit sets deadlines and explain what our team would need to do to stay ahead of them. Draft me a memo with attachments, and add a short note on how this would differ if the case were in federal court.”

Part 1: Read the Governing Rules

Start with the statewide framework. On the Florida Bar’s rules page, open Chapter 1 and read Rule 1.200 in its current form, noting the three case tracks, the 120-day track assignment requirement, the required contents of a case management order, and the standard for changing a deadline. Skim Rule 1.460 on continuances. Before relying on anything an AI tool tells you about these rules, run the Rule Currency Verifier prompt and check every claim against the live text, since this rule was rewritten recently and older descriptions still circulate. Then read Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(b) at Cornell LII and Middle District of Florida Local Rule 3.02, and note who proposes the schedule in federal court and when the scheduling order issues.

Part 2: Pull the Circuit Orders

Now find how each circuit implemented the rule. On the Seventh Circuit site, locate Administrative Order CV-2024-023-SC and its attached Uniform Case Management Order, and note how the circuit assigns tracks and what projected trial dates it sets. On the Fifteenth Circuit site, open the Civil Differentiated Case Management page and Administrative Order 3.110, and note how the DCMO issues, what Calendar Call is, and how deadline extensions work. Use the Research Plan Decomposer prompt if you want help organizing the hunt, but every document you rely on must come from the official circuit or clerk site, downloaded by you.

Part 3: Find Real Examples

Go to the clerk portals for each circuit. Use the Volusia County Clerk’s court records search to find a recently filed circuit civil negligence case and download the case management order entered in it. Do the same through the Palm Beach County Clerk’s site for a Fifteenth Circuit case. Compare what you find against the uniform orders from Part 2. If a portal requires registration for document images, capture what the public docket shows and note the limitation in your memo; working around access rules is part of real practice.

Part 4: Draft the Memo

Write a professionally formatted memo of 2 to 3 pages addressed to the supervising attorney. Use the date you complete this activity as the filing date of the hypothetical case. Calculate and compare the key deadlines the case would face in each circuit, covering both what state law requires everywhere and what each circuit adds or handles differently. Run the Deadline Mapper prompt to organize your dates into a table, then verify every date yourself against the orders before it goes in the memo. Close with one paragraph contrasting the federal approach under Rule 16 and Local Rule 3.02. Before finalizing, run the Memo Red-Teamer prompt and fix any weakness it exposes. Your discussion post is a brief summary of how you approached the research: where you started, how you found the rules and administrative orders, and where your sample documents came from. Attach the memo and the documents you downloaded.

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Suggested AI Prompts

Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.

Rule Currency Verifier

Describe the requirements of Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200 as it exists today, including when a case management order must issue, what tracks exist, and how deadlines may be extended. After your answer, list each specific claim you made as a numbered item so I can verify every one against the current rule text on the Florida Bar’s website. Flag any point where your training data may predate a rule amendment.

This prompt builds verification into the workflow by forcing the model to expose its claims as a checkable list and to surface its own uncertainty. Rule 1.200 was rewritten effective January 1, 2025, so many AI tools still describe the old version, which makes this rule a reliable test of why you verify against the primary source.

Research Plan Decomposer

You are helping me research civil case management in two Florida circuits, the Seventh and the Fifteenth. Break this project into ordered research steps, starting from the statewide rules and moving to circuit administrative orders and then to real case examples from clerk portals. For each step, tell me what document I am looking for, which official website should hold it, and what specific facts I should extract from it for a deadline-comparison memo.

Decomposition asks the model to split a large task into ordered steps before any research happens. Planning the hunt first keeps you from drowning in documents, and this move is the seed of the multi-step workflows that drive more advanced AI research tools.

Deadline Mapper

I will paste excerpts from two case management orders: the Seventh Judicial Circuit’s Uniform Case Management Order and a Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Differentiated Case Management Order. Using only the text I provide, build a table with one row per deadline (service, adding parties, discovery cutoff, motion deadlines, mediation, calendar call or docket sounding, projected trial) and one column per circuit, calculating actual dates from a filing date of [insert date]. Where one order is silent on a deadline the other sets, write “not specified” rather than guessing.

This prompt combines source grounding with structured output. Restricting the model to supplied text prevents it from filling gaps with invented deadlines, and the table format forces a complete side-by-side comparison instead of a loose summary.

Memo Red-Teamer

Act as the supervising attorney reviewing my draft memo comparing case management deadlines in Florida’s Seventh and Fifteenth Judicial Circuits. Identify the three weakest points in the memo: any deadline stated without a cited source, any place where I conflated statewide requirements with local practice, and any conclusion a skeptical reader would question. Be specific about what to fix and why.

Red-teaming asks the AI to attack your work rather than praise it, which produces sharper feedback because models default toward validation. Framing the reviewer as your supervising attorney also anchors the critique to the standards your memo actually has to meet.