City of NY Gets Whacked Again With Sanctions By Appellate Court

The City of New York is on a roll. But not the kind they like. After years of favorable treatment by the courts in the face of repeated discovery delays, it seems as though the appellate courts have had enough of they city’s dilatory tactics and refusal to obey court orders.

In Elias v. City of New York, the Appellate Division (First Department) hit the city yesterday for $7,500 in sanctions. According to plaintiff’s counsel, Charles Gershbaum, the city blew through five different discovery orders in this personal injury matter. Rather than simply accept the lower court’s new order (a sixth order, to comply with five old ones), an exasperated Gershbaum took the matter up to the appellate court, on the legal theory that enough is enough.

And the First Department responded by modifying the lower court order to smack down the city again.

It was just three months ago that 18 of the 20 appellate judges of this same appellate court took the City’s Corporation Counsel, Michael Cardozo, to the woodshed. They called Cardozo “imperious” and “insulting” for having published a top 10 list of recommendations on how the courts could be made more efficient and asked that “Judges must be made more accountable.” He had a variety of “performance measures” in mind.

Well, it seems that the appellate courts have performance measures in mind too, notably the lax performance of the City’s lawyers. The irony of Cardozo’s complaint was not lost on anyone.

It was only one day after Cardozo tried to spank the judiciary last December that the Second Department hit back, with its decision in Byam v. City of New York where the city’s answer was struck due to “willful and contumacious conduct” that the court inferred “from their repeated failures, over an extended period of time, to comply with the discovery orders, together with the inadequate, inconsistent, and unsupported excuses for those failures to disclose,” for a case going back to 1997.

While the decision yesterday in Elias was brief, it brought back echoes of the First Department’s letter of response to Cardozo, where the justices wrote that:

A vast amount of inefficiency impeding the resolution of litigation is also created by the city’s oft-demonstrated cavalier attitude toward its discovery obligations. The city’s almost routine failure to timely and fully cooperate with its discovery obligations, even in the face of repeated court orders, is regularly confronted by city part judges attempting to solve the city’s intransigence.

That letter had noted that, “[A]s a rule, our courts give far more leeway to the city than we typically do to other defendants in civil actions.”

The lower court judges that handle the city parts, who hate to get reversed, are no doubt taking notice of the substantial change in tone from our appellate courts.