Short answer. The branch clerk of court must issue the notice of pre-trial within five calendar days of that filing, and the pre-trial itself must be set no later than sixty calendar days after the last responsive pleading was filed, keeping the case moving forward on a predictable schedule.
What the law says
After the last responsive pleading has been served and filed, the branch clerk of court shall issue, within five calendar days from filing, a notice of pre-trial which shall be set not later than sixty calendar days from the filing of the last responsive pleading.
Rule 18, Section 1 — When conducted. Read the full provision →
The trigger point
Pre-trial scheduling under this rule is tied specifically to one defined event: the service and filing of the last responsive pleading in the case. Nothing under this section actually begins running or counting down until that particular pleading — whatever it happens to be in that specific case — has both been properly served on the other parties and filed with the court itself.
Two separate deadlines
Once that triggering event actually happens, two distinct clocks begin running simultaneously. First, the branch clerk of court must issue the formal notice of pre-trial within five calendar days from that filing. Second, the actual pre-trial date itself, as ultimately reflected in that notice, must be set not later than sixty calendar days counted from the filing of the last responsive pleading in the case.
Whose duty it is to issue the notice
The affirmative obligation to actually issue the notice rests specifically on the branch clerk of court, and not on either of the parties themselves or their respective counsel. Parties therefore do not need to separately file a motion asking that pre-trial be set once the last responsive pleading is finally in; the clerk's own issuance of that notice is meant to happen automatically, as a matter of course, within the five-day window described above.
Why fixed, short deadlines matter here
Pre-trial as a whole is meant to move a case along reasonably efficiently once the earlier pleadings stage has finally closed out. Fixing both a genuinely short window for issuing the notice itself and a firm outer limit for the pre-trial date proper keeps cases from simply lingering indefinitely in that awkward gap between the close of pleadings and the actual start of pre-trial proceedings. A party who notices that a case has sat well past the sixty-day outer limit without a notice of pre-trial has a concrete basis for following up with the branch clerk of court rather than simply waiting indefinitely.