Virginia's Judicial Emergency: How the Tolling Orders Affect Your Injury Deadline
Virginia law gives injured people a fixed window to sue — generally two years for personal injury. Miss it and the claim is gone, no matter how strong. So when a pandemic closes courthouses across the Commonwealth, the first question every claimant should ask is: what happened to my deadline?
The answer lives in a series of emergency orders from the Supreme Court of Virginia. Here is what they say, as of late April, in plain English.
Courthouses, it should be said, are not dark. Judges and clerks across the Commonwealth are keeping the essential machinery running — emergency custody and protective orders, bond motions, matters where liberty or safety cannot wait — and more of the routine docket is moving to telephone and video every week. What is suspended is the ordinary civil calendar: jury trials, most contested hearings, and the deadlines that drive them.
The judicial emergency and its orders
Virginia Code § 17.1-330 authorizes the Supreme Court of Virginia to declare a judicial emergency when disaster disrupts the courts. The Court has now done so three times over:
| Order | Date | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| First order | March 16, 2020 | Declared a judicial emergency; suspended non-essential, non-emergency court proceedings; tolled and extended deadlines for 21 days |
| Second order | March 27, 2020 | Clarified the tolling: applicable deadlines — including statutes of limitations that would run during the emergency — are "tolled and extended" for the duration of the order |
| Third order | April 22, 2020 | Extended the judicial emergency through May 17, 2020, continuing the suspension of non-essential proceedings and the tolling |
The practical effect: the limitations clock stopped on March 16, 2020, and it stays stopped while the emergency orders remain in effect. The tolled days are added to your deadline. Courts remain open for emergency matters — protective orders, bond hearings, emergency injunctions — and many are conducting hearings by phone or video.
How long will the emergency last? Nobody knows. The current order runs through May 17, and further extensions are possible; Governor Northam's stay-at-home order (Executive Order 55, issued March 30) currently extends into June. We will update this space as the orders change.
A concrete example of how the tolling works. Suppose you were injured in a crash on May 1, 2018, giving you until May 1, 2020 to file. Your deadline would have fallen squarely inside the emergency period — so it is tolled and extended. When the emergency orders lapse, the days they covered are added back to your clock: if 45 days of your period were consumed by the emergency, you get those 45 days on the other side. What no one should do is guess at the end date and back-count from a news report. The orders have already been amended twice; count your deadline with a lawyer, from the orders themselves, when the emergency actually ends.
The fine print worth knowing
- Tolling is not forgiveness. The days are added, not erased. When the emergency ends, deadlines resume — and a claimant who was 30 days from the deadline in March will be 30 days from the deadline again, quickly.
- Filing is still possible. Clerks' offices are processing filings even where courthouses are closed to the public. If your case is ready, there is rarely a good reason to wait and rely on emergency tolling.
- Not every deadline is a court deadline. Contractual deadlines — an uninsured motorist carrier's notice provisions, a policy's proof-of-loss requirement — are not automatically covered by judicial emergency orders. Treat them as live.
- Nonsuits and pending cases. The orders toll deadlines in pending litigation too, but hearings and trials are being continued en masse. Expect a backlog when courts reopen, and expect defense counsel and insurers to know exactly how much delay they can bank.
What this means for injured people in Virginia
First, the reassurance: if your two-year window would have closed this spring, the emergency orders have extended it. The Supreme Court of Virginia said plainly that statutes of limitations running during the emergency are tolled.
Second, the warning: tolling protects deadlines, not cases. Skid marks fade, vehicles get repaired and scrapped, businesses close for good and take their records with them. Witnesses scatter in a pandemic like no other time. The claims that will be strong when courtrooms fully reopen are the ones being worked now — treatment documented (telehealth counts), evidence preserved in writing, insurers put on notice.
And a note of perspective: emergency tolling orders are extraordinarily rare. These orders will be studied and litigated for years — exactly how the tolled days are counted, and which deadlines they reach, will generate disputes. The safe course, always, is to need none of it: file on the original timeline whenever possible.
One more practical point for people with cases already in suit: continuances are not automatic wins or losses, but they change leverage. A defendant facing a firm trial date evaluates a case differently than one facing an open-ended postponement. Plaintiffs' counsel can answer that by keeping discovery moving — depositions by videoconference are proceeding across the Commonwealth — so that when trial dates return, your case is at the front of the line rather than the back of the backlog.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.
Update: Seven successive orders ultimately extended the tolling of statutes of limitations from March 16 through July 19, 2020 — 126 days added to affected deadlines — and Virginia's appellate courts later confirmed the tolling applies to all statutes of limitations, not only those expiring during the emergency window. For where all three jurisdictions ended up, see our 2020 year in review.