By Steve Klepper (Bluesky @mdappeal)

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Maryland adopted a Rules Order (Feb. 19, 2026) containing several changes to Title 8 (Appellate Rules) and related provisions of Title 20 (electronic filing). These amendments “shall take effect and apply to all actions commenced on or after July 1, 2026 and, insofar as practicable, to all actions then pending.”

Below are the descriptions as they appeared in the Rules Committee’s 227th Report recommending these amendments. But first I will highlight the two most likely to have a practical impact on the average appeal.

First, in the Appellate Court, the number of paper copies of briefs and record extracts to be filed is reduced from eight to five, and the number to be served is reduced from two to one. The amended Rule 8-502 expressly allows parties to agree to waive service of paper copies on one another (as they often do already).

Second, the new Rule 8-503(d)(5) addresses a question that I have asked and been asked many times over the years: Do words in images count toward word limits? The new subsection (5) provides: “Images shall be used in a brief only for demonstrative purposes and not to avoid any word count limits.” For example, if your appeal involves a contract, you can’t evade word limits by pasting an image of the contract into the document. If there is something significant about visual cues in the contract, like indents or font sizes, the safe bet is to quote the language in the brief’s body (which counts toward the word limit) and then paste relevant parts of the image.