In Williams v. Illinois, 737 F.3d 473 (7th Cir. 2013) (No. 13-2652), the Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of a suit for failure to prosecute, after the plaintiff failed to serve his complaint on defendants for more than a year. Plaintiff received notice of the dismissal in the mail. Twenty-nine days after the dismissal order, plaintiff filed a motion for reconsideration. The district court held that, under FRCP 59(e), the deadline for such a motion was 28 days, which had passed, and thus it treated plaintiff’s motion as a motion to vacate the judgment under FRCP 60(b). Finding that plaintiff had failed to show any of the specific grounds justifying relief under Rule 60(b), the court denied the motion. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit held that there is a “bright-line rule” that any motion for reconsideration filed after the deadline must be construed as a motion to vacate. As a matter of first impression in the Circuit, the court further held that plaintiff did not receive, pursuant to FRCP 6(d), an additional three days to ask for reconsideration because he received the dismissal by mail. Rather, Rule 6(d) enlarges the filing time only when the period for acting runs from the service of a notice, not when the time begins after the entry of judgment, as it did here.
