Court Shows No Mercy to Lawyer Who Missed Deadline After Tactical Filing Delay
A New Jersey lawyer whose delaying tactics caused him to miss a filing deadline in a workers’ compensation case is out of luck, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The court found there is no exception to the one-year statutory deadline for moving to reinstate workers compensation petitions dismissed for lack of prosecution, the New Jersey Law Journal reported Friday. The court also said that a lawyer’s neglect or inadvertence is not grounds for relief under the law.
Voorhees lawyer Daniel Zonies received an order in 2007 dismissing four petitions he filed for claimant Susan Danter for lack of prosecution and giving him a year to move for reinstatement. His client’s first petition alleged a workplace injury to her shoulder in 2000; the other petitions alleged aggravations of that injury.
But Zonies, for tactical reasons he later admitted in court, took no action on the petitions for 10 months. Then he was hospitalized for a sudden illness and could not return to work until after the one-year filing deadline for reinstatement of the petitions had passed.
Zonies’ “goal was to use up as much of the one-year period as possible before seeking reinstatement,” the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, said in an unpublished opinion Wednesday in Danter v. Arrow International Inc. (PDF), upholding a workers compensation judge’s dismissal of the reinstatement motions as untimely. The court also noted that there was no impediment to the filing of a timely motion for nearly the entire one-year statutory period that Zonies failed to act.
