The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has vacated an order imposing sanctions on a pair of plaintiff’s attorneys because the individual they were representing failed to show for a scheduled mediation session in a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case and because a District Court judge did not provide the attorneys with enough notice that sanctions were being considered.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Miller v. Midland Credit Management can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff filed an FDCPA case against the defendant. A deadline was set to hold a mediation session, but the deadline passed without the session occurring. The District Court judge granted a limited extension to hold the mediation session. But the mediator submitted a report indicating that while the plaintiff’s attorneys had showed up for the mediation, the plaintiff had not. The defendant filed sought sanctions against the plaintiff for failure to appear. The plaintiff’s attorneys filed a status report indicating that they had been told by the plaintiff that she would be at the mediation session. A show cause order was issued to determine why the plaintiff did not appear for the mediation session, and she responded that she could not get out of work to attend. The judge imposed sanctions on the plaintiff and her attorneys, accusing the attorneys of not conducting a “prompt and reasonable” investigation into why the plaintiff did not show up for the mediation session.
At no point during the issues surrounding the mediation session did it appear as though the judge was considering sanctions against the attorneys, the Eleventh Circuit concluded. “… we do not think that Zemel and Giles were given a meaningful opportunity to respond to that possibility,” the panel wrote. Furthermore, the judge failed to make a finding of bad faith, which is required before imposing sanctions. “… neither the show-cause order nor the sanctions order squarely placed the blame for these delays on the attorneys nor did they tie them to a finding of bad faith,” the Eleventh Circuit wrote in vacating the ruling and remanding the case back to the District Court.
