Legal News

Courts See Recession?s Toll; Judge Schack Strikes Again

By Amir Efrati

Foreclosures. Assaults by family members. Contract disputes. Evictions. Unpaid bills.

Not surprisingly, those are the issues in recession-related cases that have deluged this nation’s courts in record numbers. As 2009 winds down, NYT put together this story focusing on the 4.7 million cases handled this year by New York's 1,253 state judges.

The record caseload is an increase of 63,000 from last year, the paper said. Foreclosure filings were up 17 percent to nearly 50,000. The city's Civil Courts, where suits seeking less than $25,000 are heard, have seen caseloads balloon to more than 577,000 this year, from about 200,000 10 years ago. Court administrators say much of the increase is because of suits over unpaid credit card bills.

Other states are seeing similar trends, NYT says. Florida officials say there were some 400,000 foreclosure filings there this year, an increase of 446 percent since 2006. In Arizona, officials say eviction cases have tripled in the last year, contract disputes are up 77 percent over the last two years, and there is a notable increase in cases seeking to commit people for mental health treatment because of stress-related conditions.

A Family Court judge, Pam Jackman-Brown of Queens, says her courtroom is filled with people who were once climbing corporate ladders but now describe cascading disappointments: phones shut off, child care no longer affordable, couples separated.

"You're trying to wrap your head around all of this," Judge Jackman-Brown said, "trying to find something that works."

A story by the New York Law Journal this morning shows how some state-court judges are reacting to their recession. Arthur Schack, a supreme court justice in Brooklyn, who previously graced the pages of this blog for his rulings in foreclosure cases, recently rejected a request by JP Morgan Chase for $9,112 in costs for producing subpoenaed documents, calling the claim an example of the excess and greed among “fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”

JPMorgan Chase, a non-party in an action to confirm an arbitration award, sought 25 cents per page and $25 per hour for producing 18,248 pages of subpoenaed documents demanded by the petitioner, the journal reported.

In his decision, Schack granted JPMorgan $1,250.27, or about one-seventh of the amount it requested. He quoted a recent interview of President Barack Obama on “60 Minutes” in which the president suggested that the greed of “fat cat bankers” played a role in the present recession.

“Clearly, Chase’s arbitrary $25.00 per hour … fee for the unsubstantiated 182 hours of research by person or persons unknown only helps to unjustly enrich ‘a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,’” Schack wrote.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 28, 2009 (boomark / email).