In 200 W. Armour Boulevard, LLC v. Judson, WD 87282, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, dismissed an appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction after concluding that the notice of appeal was untimely filed. The key take-away from the opinion: the time to file a notice of appeal runs from when the original judgment became final, not from the subsequent entry of a void amended judgment.
The case arose from a prescriptive-easement dispute. The trial court entered its original judgment on March 15, 2024. The appellant then filed timely after-trial motions, which the court denied on April 25, 2024. Later that same day, the court entered an amended judgment changing the allocation of costs, even though costs had not been challenged in the after-trial motions. The appellant then filed a new after-trial motion based upon the amended judgment. After that motion was denied, appellant filed her notice of appeal on June 20, 2024.
The Western District held that this sequence of events did not save the appeal. While a timely authorized after-trial motion can extend the trial court’s authority over a judgment, that authority is limited to the issues actually raised in the after-trial motions. Here, the after-trial motions filed by appellant upon the trial court’s entry of the original judgment did not challenge the allocation of costs. Accordingly, the trial court lacked authority to amend the original judgment and the amended judgment was found by the appellate court to be void and of no effect.
Once the amended judgment fell out, so did the appellant’s timing argument. The appellate court held that the notice of appeal had to be filed within ten days after the original judgment became final on April 25, 2024. Filing the notice of appeal on June 20, 2024, while timely if measured from the entry of void amended judgment, was untimely when measured from the actual final judgment. And when a notice of appeal is untimely, the appellate court has no jurisdiction and must dismiss.
The lesson of 200 W. Armour Boulevard, LLC v. Judson is straightforward but important: a party cannot rely on a void amended judgment to restart appellate filing deadlines. If a trial court improperly amends a judgment after it has lost its authority to do so, the amended judgment does not create a “new final judgment” or extend the time to file a notice of appeal. Missouri appellate filing deadlines are measured from the time the original judgment becomes final.
