10 Jul An Unexpected Tribute to Émile Zola
Portrait of Émile Zola (1848), by Édouard Manet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“The humorist Douglas Adams was fond of saying, ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’ But the law more often follows Benjamin Franklin’s stern admonition: ‘You may delay, but time will not.’ To paraphrase Émile Zola, deadlines are often the terrible anvil on which a legal result is forged.”
With these words, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week declined to retroactively extend Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 4007(c)’s deadline to file a non-dischargeability complaint. That deadline permits creditors only 60 days following an individual debtor’s initial meeting of creditors (otherwise known as the debtor’s “section 341(a) meeting”) to file a complaint to have certain types of debt determined non-dischargeable, unless a request for extension of the deadline is filed within the same, initial 60-day period.
The case before the 3-judge panel involved a creditor who had, in fact, previously obtained an extension to file a non-dischargeability complaint – but who, due to internal word-processing difficulties with conversion to the “Portable Document Format” (*.pdf) format now required for electronic filings with federal bankruptcy courts, missed the extended deadline by less than an hour.
The brief, 14-page decision (available here) upheld prior rulings in the same matter by both the Bankruptcy Court and the District Court. It raised, but did not answer, the question of what happens when a missed deadline is due to external problems (e.g., technical difficulties with the Bankruptcy Court’s filing system), rather than problems with counsel’s IT configuration or office procedures. But it also declined to recognize an “equitable exception” to the rule in the absence of a Supreme Court directive to the contrary:
We acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme Court has not expressly addressed whether FRBP 4007(c)’s filing deadline admits of any equitable exceptions and that lower courts are divided on the issue. See Kontrick v. Ryan, 540 U.S. 443, 457 & nn.11–12 (2004) (declining to decide question and noting circuit split). We need not, and do not, reach the question of whether external forces that prevented any filings—such as emergency situations, the loss of the court’s own electronic filing capacity, or the court’s affirmative misleading of a party—would warrant such an exception. See, e.g., In re Kennerley, 995 F.2d at 147–48; see also Ticknor v. Choice Hotels Intern., Inc., 275 F.3d 1164, 1165 (9th Cir. 2002). . . . In short, absent unique and exceptional circumstances not present here, we do not inquire into the reason a party failed to file on time in assessing whether she is entitled to an equitable exception from FRBP 4007(c)’s filing deadline; under the plain language of the rules and our controlling precedent, there is no such exception.
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