When little things go wrong, large and unpleasant consequences may follow. A cautionary tale:
An attorney in San Diego representing the potential plaintiff in a medical malpractice case to be venued in San Francisco submitted the complaint for filing two days before the statute of limitations was set to expire. Unfortunately, the filing fee check the attorney submitted with the complaint was in an amount $3.00 less than required by local court rules. The court clerk rejected the filing. Counsel did not learn of the rejection until after the statutory time to file had expired. The complaint was accepted with a new fee check, but the defendants were ultimately able to obtain a dismissal on the basis of the statute of limitations. Confronted with these facts, the Court of Appeal is sympathetic to the plaintiff's plight, but ultimately unable to come to her aid:
Benjamin Franklin described the snowballing consequences of inattention to a small detail—'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.' (Oxford Dict. of Quotations (2d ed. 1955) p. 211.) In this case the missing nail is a check that was $3 short of the amount required to file a complaint for medical malpractice that allegedly caused the death of the plaintiffs’ infant child. The harsh but unavoidable result is that we affirm the trial court’s dismissal of the complaint because it was not filed before the statute of limitations ran.
Noting that "[a]n unbroken line of decisions by our Supreme Court holds that it is mandatory for court clerks to demand and receive the fee required by statute before documents or pleadings are filed", the court reluctantly rejected plaintiff's argument that the $3.00 shortfall was a trivial defect that should not preclude the complaint from being deemed to have been filed when it arrived in the courthouse.
Three practical safety tips for attorneys can be drawn here:
♣ Try to avoid filing complaints at the last moment before the expiration of a statute of limitations. [There is much less room for error when the time to correct a mistake or to respond to a surprise development is so short.]
♣ Be extra cautious when filing in a court at a distance from your own local practice. [Again, reaction times slow when the problem is developing hundreds of miles away. If the case were being filed in San Diego rather than San Francisco, the San Diego attorney would probably still have had time to submit the extra fee.]
♣ Always double-check the procedural details of the local rules of the court in which you are filing. [The precise reason the fee check came up short here is not stated, but one possible cause is an assumption that the fee in San Francisco was the same as in San Diego. As 'twas said of old: "When you assume, you make an ass of you and me." (Ass u me - get it?)]
The sad story can be read in the decision in Duran v. St. Luke's Hospital (December 16, 2003), Case No. A102182, at these links in PDF and Word formats.
Comments