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.