Some Lawsuits Take A Decade Or Longer To Be Resolved

// Most people understand that the wheels of justice move slowly and that it can take a very long time for some lawsuits to resolve. Indeed, it is very common for lawsuits to take several years to reach a resolution from the filing of the complaint to settlement, trial, or another kind of disposition. Recently, I was speaking with a colleague who was handling a lawsuit that has been going on for seven or eight years and showed no signs of slowing down. The conversation made me think of some ancient lawsuits I handled in the past and why some litigation matters take so long to resolve.

When I was a “street lawyer” earlier in my career, I had up to 44 litigation matters I primary managed. Of those cases, I believe that I had two matters that were over 10 years old (although thankfully, both of the matters resolved many years ago). One litigation matter was a case that had spent an incredible amount of time in hibernation, which mostly explained why it had taken so long to resolve.

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The case was complicated, and it involved numerous defendants. This usually adds to the time it takes a case to resolve since each of the defendants needs to be deposed and also needs to go through the motions of the litigation process, which can add months or years to the time it takes a matter to be resolved. Unfortunately, one of the defendants passed away during the pendency of the litigation, which complicated matters. An estate needed to be established for the deceased party, and eventually, the executor of the estate for this deceased party was substituted into the case for the party who had passed away.

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Later in the case, one of the defendants declared bankruptcy, which again created complications. The case needed to be stalled again so that matters with the bankruptcy entity could be resolved. Eventually the case against the bankrupt entity was severed so the matter could continue against the other defendants, and this required motion practice that required months of patience since the jurisdiction in which the case was venue was extremely slow.

By the time the case was ready for a resolution, people had difficulty locating stakeholders to the matter as well as documents and information relevant to the lawsuit. Some defendants were genuinely shocked that this case had continued for so long and could barely remember what the matter had been about. I believe the matter went for around a dozen years before reaching a resolution, and four or five attorneys at our firm had passed the file around as people joined and left our shop.

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I had another matter that lasted for over a decade, and this length of time was attributable to other factors. This other matter was initiated when I was a freshman in high school, and landed on my desk in my sophomore year as a practicing attorney. The case had a number of defendants and concerned some complicated matters. The paper discovery in this case was intense and the deposition transcripts were just about as thick as I have ever seen for a transcript.

Sometime when I was in college, the matter had been appealed to the intermediate appellate court in our jurisdiction. This added a few years to the case since the matter needed to be appealed, briefed, argued, and, finally, the appellate court needed to render a decision. Eventually, the trial court needed to arrange proceedings that were ordered by the higher court. Another reason why the case lasted so long was that an additional party was joined years into the lawsuit, and the parties needed to go through the motions of amending the pleadings and allowing the new party to proceed with discovery to the extent not already exchanged between the other parties.

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By the time I left that firm, the case was still going strong against a few of the defendants. It was only years later that the case was finally resolved. Whenever court officers read the index number for that matter and realized that the case had been filed shortly after Y2K, they would gasp. However, none of the court officers, attorneys, or any of the parties seemed to be in a particular hurry to resolve the case anytime soon.

I would love to hear from other attorneys about marathon cases they handled in their own practices, and, of course, working on cases that have been kicking around for a dozen years or more is relatively rare in the legal profession. However, there are a few ways that lawsuits can get slowed down in the mud of jurisprudence, and this can make it so that lawsuits take much more time than usual to reach a resolution.

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at [email protected].

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