By Steven C. Fraser, Esq. | FL Bar No. 625825 | DC Bar No. 460026
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has issued a revised civil cover sheet. The form is labeled JS-44 (Rev. 8/2026 DC), and it is now the court's official version. The court's public notice states that the requirement takes effect September 1, 2026; the Clerk's Office notice circulated to the bar asks filers to begin attaching the revised form to complaints and petitions now, and warns that beginning September 1, new civil cases filed without it will be marked deficient.
The form is posted on the court's site.
That is the administrative headline, and it is the part most filers will act on: download the new PDF, throw out the bookmark to the old one, attach it to the complaint. But the revision is not cosmetic. The D.C. cover sheet has not been updated since November 2020, and the 2026 version changes how case assignment actually works. If you fill out the new form the way you filled out the old one, you will get partway through it and find that a field you have been checking for six years no longer exists.
What actually changed
I pulled both revisions and compared them field by field. Four changes matter.
1. The A-N case assignment checkboxes are gone. This is the structural change, and it is the one that will surprise people. On the November 2020 form, Section IV asked you to do two things: check one of the fourteen lettered category boxes (A. Antitrust, B. Personal Injury/Malpractice, C. Administrative Agency Review, and so on), and then check one nature-of-suit code inside that category. The lettered boxes were real form fields. On the 8/2026 revision they are not. The letters survive only as printed headings organizing the columns. There is nothing to check.
The instruction was rewritten to match. The old Section IV read "Place an X in one category, A-N, that best represents your Cause of Action and one in a corresponding Nature of Suit." The new one reads "Place an X in one Nature of Suit that best represents your Cause of Action." You now make one selection instead of two, and the case assignment deck follows from the nature-of-suit code you pick rather than from a separate declaration.
2. Category D is now mandatory, and it has its own checkbox. Category D covers actions accompanied by a motion for temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. Under the old form, D was permissive: "Any nature of suit from any category may be selected for this category of case assignment." The new form makes it a requirement. It reads: "This category must be selected if the action is accompanied by a Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and/or Preliminary Injunction," and it adds, in bold on the form itself, that a corresponding nature of suit from another category must also be selected. Category D is the one place on the new sheet that kept a checkbox of its own.
So D is the exception to the one-selection rule. If you are filing with a TRO or PI motion, you check the D box and pick a nature of suit from somewhere else. Antitrust still governs if that is your claim.
3. Two nature-of-suit codes moved. Code 899, Administrative Procedure Act / Review or Appeal of Agency Decision, has been moved out of Category E (General Civil) and into Category C (Administrative Agency Review), where it more sensibly belongs. And code 890, Other Statutory Actions, has been cleaned up: it was previously listed in both C and E with confusing parentheticals, and the C listing is now deleted. In E, its qualifier narrowed from "if not administrative agency review or Privacy Act" to simply "if not Privacy Act."
If you file APA challenges in the District, which is a substantial share of that court's civil docket, note that 899 now sits in a different column than the one you are used to scanning.
4. There is a companion nature-of-suit description document. The new form hyperlinks the word "here" in Section IV and again in the instructions, pointing to a separate PDF of nature-of-suit code descriptions. That document is new. Given that the form now asks you to pick the nature of suit without first narrowing by category, having the descriptions available is more than a convenience.
One error on the face of the new form
Category E lists bankruptcy appeals as "422 Appeal 27 USC 158." The correct citation is 28 U.S.C. ยง 158. The November 2020 form had it right. I confirmed this is on the printed form itself and not an artifact of text extraction.
It is a typographical error on an administrative document and it does not change anyone's rights, so I would not make more of it than that. But if you file a bankruptcy appeal in the District and someone later asks why your cover sheet cites a title of the U.S. Code that has nothing to do with bankruptcy, the answer is that you used the court's official form as published.
What did not change
It is worth being precise about this, because a revised form invites over-reading.
The county-of-residence conventions are the same: 11001 for a District of Columbia resident, 88888 for a U.S. resident outside the District, 99999 for a party outside the United States. Sections I, II, III, V (Origin), VI (Cause of Action), VII (Requested in Complaint), and VIII (Related Cases) are textually identical. The Origin options are still 1 through 8. The related-case procedure is unchanged: answer yes and you must complete a separate related case form.
The signature block is unchanged. There is no new certification, no new attestation, and nothing resembling the cite-accuracy certification that Florida added to its state filings this summer. It remains "Signature of Attorney of Record" over a date line.
The split between "E. General Civil (Other)" and "F. Pro Se General Civil" is not new either. That already existed on the 2020 form, as did the "(If pro se, select this deck)" notes on the employment discrimination and FOIA categories.
What to do before September 1
For anyone with civil matters headed to the District:
- Replace the saved copy. If your office has a form bank, an intake packet, or a filing checklist that links to the old
CivilCoverSheetJS44_Nov_2020FILL.pdf, that link needs to change. The old PDF is still reachable on the court's server, which is exactly how a stale bookmark keeps producing deficient filings after the deadline. - Attach it to the complaint or petition. The Clerk's Office notice is specific on this point: the revised form goes in as an attachment to the initiating document.
- Re-learn Section IV. One nature-of-suit selection, not a category plus a code. If a TRO or PI motion rides along, check D as well.
- If you file APA cases, look for 899 under C.
- This is the District's form, not the national one. The Administrative Office publishes a general JS-44 used across the federal system. The District of Columbia uses its own version, with its own case assignment structure and its own county codes. Do not substitute the national form because it happens to be the one your document assembly software defaults to.
Why a cover sheet is worth this much attention
The JS-44 is not a pleading. It creates no rights and waives none, and the form says as much: it "neither replaces nor supplements the filings and services of pleadings." It exists so the Clerk can open a docket.
But it is the first thing the court sees, it drives which judge gets the case, and getting it wrong produces a deficiency notice before anyone has read a word of the complaint. Filing deadlines do not pause while a deficiency gets cured. I have written before that procedure is often where rights either live or quietly disappear, and this is the mundane end of that same principle: a form nobody thinks about, a change nobody announced loudly, and a September date after which the old habit stops working.
Download the new one this week.
Steven C. Fraser is admitted in the District of Columbia (1998) and Florida (2003), and is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the Middle, Northern, and Southern Districts of Florida. This article is general information about a court's administrative filing requirement and is not legal advice.