Brooklyn Supreme Court working to get rid of old foreclosure cases

May 10, 2017 By Rob Abruzzese Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Charles Small, chief clerk for Civil Matters. Eagle file photo by Rob Abruzzese

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In a move to alleviate the backlog of foreclosure cases, the Kings County Supreme Court is working to clear cases that have had no activity since Sept. 30, 2016. On Tuesday, the court sifted through sitting cases during a special session in an effort to determine which have been abandoned and which ones are still active.

“We’re just trying to determine which cases are real cases,” said Charles Small, chief clerk for Civil Matters. “There can be real reasons for a case to be inactive for that long. We are trying to determine which is which and we’ve had a lot of people coming in and giving updates.”

If a case has had no activity since Sept. 30, 2016, the court will move to dismiss it unless one of the attorneys involved indicates to the court that the case is still active. If the court closes a case mistakenly, Small explained that it can be reopened with a simple motion.

The court has been attempting to notify attorneys for more than a month to try to get them in to update judges and clerks as to their activity. It reached out to all of the local bar associations, posted notices in the court going back to March and took out a daily advertisement in the New York Law Journal that ran for six weeks.

Multiple attorneys with foreclosure cases pending spoke to the Brooklyn Eagle and said that while there has been some confusion involving this process — which has never been tried before in Brooklyn, that overall — it is a good thing.

“There are various reasons why active cases sit without court appearances or anything being done,” said Jeffrey Saltiel, treasurer of the Kings County Housing Court Bar Association. “Sometimes people feel that it’s not worth it to fight a case, and the case will die in discovery. In foreclosure, sometimes notes are transferred to investors and sometimes banks don’t even know what they even own which causes cases to basically die a slow death where they sit for years with no activity at all.”

There has been some pushback against this idea. Public Advocate Letitia James called on the court to stop the plan and claimed that it violates due process. However, court employees stressed that anyone with an active case in the court merely need to notify the court that their case is ongoing and it will not be dismissed.

“Nothing has been dismissed at this point,” Small stressed. “Right now, we’re going to take the list, all the notices of intent, and I have a team of people working on it right now to see what is really active and what has been abandoned. We’re carefully taking this list and the notices of intent and go through the list and make sure we know which cases are active.”

One lawyer explained to the Eagle that this will benefit homeowners more than lenders because dismissing a case benefits them more than pushing foreclosure cases to settlement no matter what.

“I can’t think of a single homeowner who would be prejudiced by an administrative dismissal of a foreclosure, and in fact, many might benefit if the statute of limitations on suing on a default has run,” said Jimmy Lathrop, a trustee at the Brooklyn Bar Association. “The opposition to the dismissal calendar could be just the usual chorus of disapproval from the nonprofits looking to keep the gravy train of funding rolling in.”

The Legal Aid Society did not responded to requests for comment by press time.