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The Landlord-Tenant Parts of Civil Court, Queens County

You would expect a place like the landlord-tenant parts of Civil Court, Queens County, to be a very busy place, and, indeed, it is.  It is so busy that it has both morning and afternoon calendars.  An attorney appearing there for the first time may be a bit confused about the procedures used by the parts.   When you first arrive, you need to check into the part to which your matter is assigned. Once you have checked in, you will be directed to another court will for the purpose of conferencing the matter. The conferencing courtroom has room for a number of court attorneys who perform the function of conferencing. Once in that courtroom, you need to periodically callout your case to determine whether the adverse parties have arrived. Once they have arrived, you need to conference the case with them. This can be rather short. For example, I recently had a case where the adverse party said nothing more than that she would not discuss the case without an attorney and she wanted an adjournment. In most cases, the court’s hope and your hope is to work out a stipulation of settlement. In any case, once you have completed conferencing the matter with the adverse party, you need to go to the back of the courtroom where the court files are located, find the file for your case, and deposit the file in one of three boxes labeled “conference,” “stipulation” and “adjournment.” A court attorney will eventually get to your file, and call your case. That that point, the file will be processed as appropriate. For example, if you have a stipulation of settlement, the court attorney will go over that stipulation in particular with pro se parties, and will then be further file back to the particular landlord-tenant part for the judge allocate on the stipulation.

The process sounds confusing, but as so often proves the case works for this court.

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Hardcopy of Motion Papers

Currently, every court which permits or requires the electronic filing of motion papers still requires the litigants to file paper copies of the motion papers. In federal court, the hardcopy of the motion papers is called a “Courtesy Copy.” In state court, the hardcopy is called a “Working Copy.” I recently encountered an example of the judge who issued a directive that hardcopies of motion papers would no longer be needed. The judge stated that he would be relying on the electronic version of the motion papers. It looks as if  judges are truly moving, though slowly, to the fully electronic processing of papers. Trees are likely to be grateful about this development.

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Handling Foreclosure Status Conferences

One type of appearance that I handle is the foreclosure status conference.  I’ve handled them for both the creditor and the debtor.  In either case, the key to preparation is being provided information on transactions since the last conference, including the status of loss mitigation efforts.  Although this can usually be handled by simply summarizing the information in an email, sometimes providing a copy of the latest document exchanges between the parties proves helpful.

I’ll give you a recent example.  The bank had received three of the latest bank statements of the debtor.  However, the last bank statement failed to reflect several expected, business-related deposits.  So, the bank asked for another bank statement.  I agreed to provide that, but I noticed, because the firm giving me the assignment had given me a copy of the last exchange, that the last bank statement was dated only a couple of days before the FSC.  So, I noted that to the hearing officer handling the FSC, saying it would take about a month to get the extra bank statement to the bank.  So, rather than scheduling the next conference a couple of weeks out, the JHO adjourned the matter for  enough time to get the statement to the bank, have the bank review it, and determine whether anything more was needed.