Lin v. Teng Fei Restaurant Group Inc.
- Freeman
- 1:17-cv-01774
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Lin v. Teng Fei, Judge Freeman ordered each noncompliant plaintiffs’ attorney to face a doubled $2,000 sanction by February 12, 2020.
John Troy and Aaron Schweitzer, the attorneys for the plaintiffs, were subject to the conditional doubling of their previously imposed sanctions.
What happened
In Lin v. Teng Fei Restaurant Group Inc., the court had previously ordered attorneys John Troy and Aaron Schweitzer to each pay a $1,000 sanction for missing deadlines to submit joint pretrial materials. Their payments and proof of payment were due January 31, 2020.
Neither attorney paid or filed proof of payment. The attorneys also did not become excused from paying because the parties reported reaching a settlement in principle; the court said the case remained open for review of the proposed settlement and that the sanctions were separate from the underlying case.
Judge Debra Freeman ordered that the sanction for each attorney who failed to pay and file proof by February 12, 2020, would be doubled from $1,000 to $2,000.
The detailed version
- Lin v. Teng Fei Restaurant Group Inc. · No. 1:17-cv-01774
- Freeman
- Feb. 5, 2020
Background
The court had earlier sanctioned John Troy and Aaron Schweitzer, attorneys for the plaintiffs, $1,000 each for continued failure to meet court-ordered deadlines for submitting joint pretrial materials. The January 17, 2020 sanctions order required each attorney to pay the sanction to the Clerk of Court and file proof of payment on the case docket within 14 days, making payment due by January 31, 2020.
Troy asked the court to reconsider the sanctions, but the court denied that request on January 27, 2020. Neither Troy nor Schweitzer paid the sanctions or filed proof of payment by the deadline, and the court stated that neither had done so as of the date of this order. The court also independently confirmed with its cashier that neither payment had been made.
Settlement and Continuing Obligation
The court considered that the attorneys might have believed their payment obligations ended after Schweitzer informed the court that the parties had reached a settlement in principle. The court explained that it had only postponed the trial and had not closed the case because it still needed to review the proposed settlement for fairness. It further explained that sanctions remain effective regardless of the status of the underlying case because sanctions are separate from the underlying dispute.
Order
The court ordered that, if either Troy or Schweitzer failed to pay the court-ordered sanction and file proof of payment on the docket by February 12, 2020, the sanction would be doubled for that attorney, from $1,000 to $2,000. This order addressed enforcement of previously imposed sanctions and did not decide the plaintiffs’ underlying claims.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.