The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to deny a plaintiff’s attorney’s appeal for filing a motion to extend the deadline to file a notice of appeal because it was submitted 16 minutes late and dismissed another case involving the plaintiff for a lack of jurisdiction because it is untimely.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Boscoe Chung v. Lamb can be accessed by clicking here.
The lower court originally granted summary judgment to the defendant because the plaintiff’s attorney — Karen Hammer — had failed to disclose an agreement where the original plaintiff had assigned her Fair Debt Collection Practices Act claim to the attorney before the original suit was filed. Summary judgment was granted because the plaintiff lacked in-person standing because the claim had been assigned to the attorney prior to the case being filed. The court also rejected a request from the attorney to substitute herself as the named plaintiff because she represented “the gold standard evidence of intentionally naming the incorrect real party in interest as a tactical maneuver.”
The final judgment in the case was entered on Nov. 14, 2018. The 30-day deadline to file a notice of appeal thus expired on Dec. 14, 2018. The attorney filed the notice of appeal at 12:16am on Dec. 15, 2018, claiming she first mistakenly logged into the wrong site and then logged into the correct site but used the wrong credentials.
But the appeals court did not buy any of the arguments.
“Ms. Hammer’s misplaced efforts to reach the correct filing platform do not render the clerk’s office inaccessible any more than entering the wrong street address into her GPS would have if she were attempting to file a paper copy,” it wrote. “The clerk’s office was accessible on December 14, Ms. Hammer simply failed to access it.”
The Appeals Court also ruled that the District Court judge did not err in not granting an extension for the appeal to be filed because Hammer waited until the last possible minute to try and file the appeal.
