Michael Joyce, Esq.’s Post

Just another example of how plaintiff friendly the Pennsylvania court system is.

As a civil defense attorney, I file a lot of Preliminary Objections/Motions to Dismiss, 9 out of 10 (and that’s probably being generous) of which are denied without an opinion or reasoning as to why, no matter how valid the argument. This at times can be severely disheartening and makes me wonder at times, what is the point? Today, however, was one of those few instances that reminded me why you always make the argument even if the odds are stacked against you. We recently took on a case where our clients were being sued for wrongful use of civil proceedings. The plaintiff, a former attorney, had signed an admission agreement on behalf of a resident at a retirement community as the resident’s “responsible person.” Under the admissions agreement if the resident stopped paying rent, the community could hold the responsible person liable for the unpaid rent. After 6 months of the resident not paying the rent, the community retained our client to file a lawsuit on its behalf against the plaintiff, as the responsible person, for the unpaid rent. Following numerous motions practice, the community asked our client to withdraw the lawsuit as the community did not believe it was worth it for the money owed and the client dismissed the case. The plaintiff subsequently brought a lawsuit against our client arguing that the client did not have probable cause to bring the underlying lawsuit on the community’s behalf. Knowing that the lawsuit had no merit and there was clearly probably cause based on the admissions agreement which the plaintiff attached to his complaint, we filed preliminary objections seeking complete dismissal of the case based on the agreement. Following briefing, we decided to take the uncommon step nowadays of requesting oral argument. At oral argument we explained to the judge in detail (probably more than he would have liked) exactly why the case had no merit. Despite the judge seeming to agree with us at oral argument, he took the matter under advisement and did not issue a ruling that day. This again was disheartening as I felt that it was about to be another one of those cases where despite the validity of the argument the objections would just be denied without opinion. Today, we received an order and opinion from the judge granting our objections and dismissing the plaintiff’s entire complaint with prejudice. When I communicated this to the client I could tell how happy they were and it was a great reminder that we do this for that 1 in 10 times where fighting that battle, even though it’s an uphill one, is worth it all in the end. #law #civildefence