Answer Your Lawyer's Emails

A recent opinion of the D.C. Court of Appeals is, on the surface, about procedural doctrines on service of process and court notices.  But the case also teaches a simpler lesson:  Answer your lawyer’s emails.

Homeowner Juliana Molinuevo Then purchased her D.C. condominium unit at foreclosure and filed a complaint to quiet title and for other relief.  Plus Properties Trust, an Oxon Hill, Md.-based outfit about which information is scarce, believed it had a first lien on the unit.  Ms. Molinuevo Then named Plus Properties Trust as a defendant in an amended complaint, but she never served the amended complaint on it. 

Plus Properties Trust nevertheless obtained the complaint, hired a lawyer – and proceeded to mess up its case in numerous ways.

It moved to dismiss, but without claiming it had not been served with the complaint; failed to file an answer to the complaint when due, or ever, leading to the entry of a default; failed to show up for the default hearing and had a default judgment entered against it; unsuccessfully moved to vacate, then to alter or amend, the judgment, claiming that it had not been served with the complaint and had not received notices regarding the default and the default hearing; and lost all issues on appeal since it had never previously raised the service issue and since the default judgment was entirely proper based on its failure to answer the complaint.

As a result, whatever interest Plus Properties Trust believes it had in Ms. Molinuevo Then’s condominium unit is lost forever.

The Court of Appeals’s opinion leaves much unsaid, as is often true. There is, however, one offhand sentence that stands out:

“Ms. Baker moved to withdraw as counsel for Plus Properties Trust and Mr. Strickland because she had not received adequate communications from them during the pendency of the case.”

There is much that litigation counsel simply cannot do without authorization, or information, from her client.  One wonders how much of the string of errors that occurred would have been avoided with better communication.  Did Plus Properties Trust respond to inquiries from its counsel seeking information needed to answer the complaint, seeking authorization to make filings or perform other tasks, etc.?  To what extent did its apparent nonresponsiveness create the circumstances that led to the entry of the default judgment?

Your lawyer cannot help you if you don’t communicate with her.

The case is Plus Properties Trust v. Molinuevo Then, 2022-CA-000759-B, Oct. 17, 2024 (Shanker, J.).