59.06 Preservation of error

If you want to appeal a court's decision later, you don't have to first file a motion for a new trial just to protect your right to raise certain issues on appeal. As long as you already objected or raised the problem properly when it happened during the case, that's enough to preserve it for appeal.

This matters because some people mistakenly think they must ask the trial court for a new trial before they can bring up an error to a higher court. This rule says that's not true, at least for issues you already flagged properly at the time, like objecting to a ruling, order, or jury instruction. Filing a motion for a new trial is not a required extra step for those kinds of errors.

In short, this rule saves you from having to repeat yourself. If you already objected to something at the right time during the trial, you don't need to bring it up again in a new trial motion just to keep your right to appeal it later.