In a case that was defendant by the team at Gordon Rees, a Magistrate Court judge in Georgia has decided to award partial attorney’s fees and costs to the defendant that was sued by two plaintiffs for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, after the plaintiffs withdrew a voluntary motion to dismiss, only to file a second motion to dismiss months later, which required a second set of depositions of the plaintiffs among other activities, largely based on “untrue statements” made by the plaintiffs and one of their attorneys.
The Background: You may remember reading about this case back during the summer, when the judge ordered the plaintiffs to show cause why they shouldn’t be ordered to pay for the defendant’s attorney’s fees and costs from the moment after they withdrew their first motion to dismiss.
- Much of the backstory is included in the links above and below, so if you are interested in everything that led up to this point, you can catch it all by clicking on one of them.
The Ruling: Noting that the award of attorney’s fees and costs upon dismissal of a case with prejudice is unusual, Judge Russell G. Vineyard of the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia noted that this was not an “ordinary” case. Had the plaintiffs stopped when they filed their initial motion to dismiss, things would have been all square, Judge Vineyard noted. But withdrawing the motion, and forcing the defendants to depose the plaintiffs a second time, to file a motion to depose the plaintiff’s attorney, and respond to a motion for summary judgment filed by the plaintiffs while also responding to a second motion to dismiss was a bridge too far.
- ” The plaintiffs’ ‘untrue statements’ and persistence in pursuing their claims after initially moving to dismiss them with prejudice contributed to PRA unnecessarily incurring attorneys’ fees and costs, and their counsel’s role in advising this course of conduct without an adequate investigation of plaintiffs’ credibility and their claims and the filing of a motion for summary judgment after plaintiffs’ second depositions again raised concerns support requiring both plaintiffs and their counsel to jointly and severally pay PRA’s reasonable attorney’s fees and costs incurred after the withdrawal of the first motion to voluntarily dismiss with prejudice,” Judge Vineyard wrote.
