Oregon court rules & publisher orders

CJO 2026-021 — Adoption of Amendments to the Uniform Trial Court Rules — physical PDF page 14

CJO 2026-021 — Adoption of Amendments to the Uniform Trial Court Rules · physical PDF page 14 · 2026

A-13 
2. 2.010—FORM OF DOCUMENTS  
 
 Amended to remove the requirement to prepare pleadings, motions, and 
requested instructions with numbered lines. 
 
ACTION TAKEN 
No motion was made to change the committee’s preliminary 
recommendation of approval.  Accordingly, by committee convention, the 
October 24, 2025, preliminary recommendation became the committee’s 
final recommendation of approval. 
 
EXPLANATION 
This proposal, submitted by Judge Matthew A. Rowan, Circuit Court Judge, 
Jackson County Circuit Court, amends UTCR 2.010(4) to remove the 
requirement that all pleadings, motions, and requested instructions be 
prepared with numbered lines. 
 
Prior to the fall 2025 meeting, the proponent provided the following written 
testimony: 
• The proposed changes eliminate the need for pleading paper.  The 
requirement of pleading paper is outdated and does not align with 
federal pleading or Oregon appellate court briefing format requirements.  
In a digital age, requiring numbered pages serves no purpose.  In fact, 
most pleadings submitted by litigants do not align with the numbers on 
the pleading paper.  Further, and more importantly, the pleading 
numbers (and often, lines included that separate the line numbers from 
text body) disrupt Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning, 
making it very difficult to turn a PDF submitted to the court into an 
editable Word document.  By eliminating the line numbers from a 
pleading, documents can be easily scanned and converted from PDFs 
to Word documents; this will allow litigants and the court to be more 
efficient in creating new documents out of those on record with the court 
through basic document conversion software (e.g., Adobe). 
• The proposed changes require uniformity of font and text size.  This 
brings the font type and size requirements into alignment with the 
requirements for appellate briefings.  In sum, the proposed changes are 
designed to increase uniformity across Oregon courts and modernize 
pleading forms for the 21st Century in which electronic filing rules the 
day. 
 
At the fall 2025 meeting, the committee discussed the following: 
• Numbered lines hinder PDF‑to‑Word conversion and can interfere with 
accessibility tools. 
• Removing numbered lines improves readability.

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Captured 2026-10-18T22:31:09.969140+00:00 · Chief Justice amendment order effective 2026-08-01; original amendment document, not consolidated rule text Only approved-change pages1-25 and out-of-cycle amendment pages94-101 are indexed. Disapproved proposals, deferred recommendations and administrative actions on pages26-93 and102-105 remain source context only. This packet is not consolidated rule text; dates differ by provision.

Publisher order or amendment document. Deleted/added wording and operative scope must be read in the original; do not treat every extracted sentence as an active rule.