PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR RULE 21 PROCEEDINGS IN THE COLORADO SUPREME COURT.

From 2010 through 2017, the Colorado Supreme Court received on average 250 petitions each year under Colorado Rule of Appellate Procedure 21 (Rule 21)--about one for every working day. In these "Rule 21 petitions," litigants ask the court to exercise its original jurisdiction and grant relief from a lower court or tribunal's ruling, action, or inaction where no other adequate appellate remedy is available. Significantly, the court has agreed to grant this entirely discretionary relief in only a small fraction of those cases. The great disparity between the number of petitions the court receives and the number of cases the court ultimately agrees to review suggests, perhaps, that Colorado litigants might benefit from a Rule 21 primer. That is what we set out to provide in this Article. We begin by briefly explaining what Rule 21 is and how it operates. Next, we share statistics that highlight the court's recent Rule 21 proceedings. Most notably, the statistics reveal the small percentage of petitions that the court agrees to grant. After supplying that background information, we offer practical considerations about filing Rule 21 petitions that we hope will inform litigants whether seeking relief through Rule 21 is appropriate and, if so, how best to present a petition. To aid in this discussion, we apply some of these practical considerations to cases in which the court agreed to exercise its original jurisdiction and issued an opinion. We hope that sharing these considerations will teach practitioners about Rule 21 and help litigants decide whether their case merits relief through the exercise of what the supreme court has called an "extraordinary remedy.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]