Mark Levison, The Levison Group
At 9 p.m. on Friday evening the jury came in after four hours of deliberating on the three week trial. The results for my client were less than stellar. Like the majority of cases I’ve been fortunate enough to handle through the years, there was a lot of money involved. There were large legal fees and press coverage. It’s more or less fancy stuff with a dozen or so onlookers hanging around late on Friday to hear the verdict. When I got home I was tired and my wife was sympathetic when she handed me her list of things to do within the next week concerning her real estate business. She owns a lot of rental property. The neighborhoods and tenants vary.
I remember the first time I appeared in landlord/tenant court for her. A lawyer I knew who handles bulk filings wanted to know, “What’s a lawyer like you doing in a place like this?” He made it clear he didn’t think I knew what I was doing and, of course, he was right. Thanks to my wife, I have learned at least a little. One thing I’ve learned is that what goes on in the landlord/tenant world, from a legal and non-legal standpoint, is every bit as interesting as my higher profile cases.
Recently Cheryl rented a very expensive property to a seemingly nice young woman who had several children. Cheryl asked me to meet the tenant’s parents the day she moved in. I had a queasy feeling about the stability of a grown woman who required her parent’s presence at a move in. In fact, as soon as she moved in she decided she didn’t really want to be there and felt no obligation to pay the rent. What she did do was to claim water had seeped in through the basement door and damaged her property. Cheryl happened to have a workman in the house at the time, so she asked him to rush downstairs. According to Mike, there was 1/16 inch of water spreading about 18 inches from the door, caused by the fact that delivery men were carrying in a washer and dryer in the middle of a rainstorm. Mike said the water hadn’t touched anything other than the concrete basement floor, and he wiped it up. The non-rent paying tenant sued Cheryl for $5,000 for water damage to her personal property. When I say “Cheryl,” she sued an LLC that purportedly owned the property, but it didn’t. Suing and serving the wrong defendant meant no notice of the trial, so no court appearance by me. Nevertheless, a default judgment was entered for the $5,000 (albeit, against the wrong company) and the tenant somehow got a personal judgment against Cheryl as well. So now Cheryl had someone living in a beautiful rental property who hadn’t paid the rent, and was waiving around a $5,000 judgment from a court that her husband had not bothered to appear before. Needless to say, I rather quickly visited the judge and got the default set aside.
The case was retried the next week. The contested trial resulted in a defendant’s verdict to the shock and dismay of the tenant and her mother, who had proffered what they believed to be conclusive damage testimony. It just so happened the next day we went to court for the eviction matter. The tenant had a counterclaim for $5,000 there as well, based upon different damages. That didn’t go well for her either.
As interesting as these little court appearances may be, they are actually mundane compared to some of Cheryl’s legal and extra-legal encounters with her tenants. You see, Cheryl has unusual relationships with her renters. First of all, she calls them her “clients” (when she’s not calling them names), and I think that’s a nice touch. Bob, for instance, is a guy who she often talked to for hours on the phone and sued five times over the course of two years. He would eventually show up in court, pay the two or three month’s rent that was due, shake my hand, inquire about Cheryl, and leave. Recently, however, Cheryl decided she had gone through it with Bob too many times, and told me, “[D]on’t take his money this time, I want him out.”
Although Bob told Cheryl he would leave, it was taking too long, and Cheryl had another renter ready to move in. Cheryl told me she was going over to the property to tell Bob he had to get his last things out, lock the door behind him and give her the key. She asked if I wanted to come. Now, what does a husband say to a client/wife after such a request? When we walked up the stairs to his front porch, Bob was sitting in a rocking chair drinking beer. Cheryl said, “Bob, you said you’d be gone by now.” He told her he was working on it. Cheryl quickly determined that drinking beer in a rocking chair was not “working on it,” so she started screaming at him.
Bob’s wife, who has a good paying job from a major employer in town, walked out to the porch, didn’t like the fact that Bob and Cheryl were screaming at each other, took her last bag of clothes, got in her SUV and drove off, leaving Bob on the porch. I looked at Cheryl and said, “Okay, what now?” She demanded the key from Bob, got it, locked the door and called the police to get Bob off the porch. For the next several days Bob kept showing up outside the house drunk. It seems his wife had kept driving.
Back to the night after my three-week trial: the first thing on Cheryl’s to-do list was “sue Joanne.” One day while I was in the middle of trial, Cheryl told me that Joanne suffered a nervous breakdown and she was taking her to the hospital. My immediate reaction was why is the landlord taking the tenant to the hospital? The answer is, well, it’s Cheryl. She tends to get involved with her clients. In fact, I recall that when she evicted one tenant she rented a large truck, helped him load his possessions, drove the truck to his new living quarters and unloaded his furniture there. Anyway, while I was in trial, she went over to Joanne’s house but could not convince her to go to the hospital. In the next several days apparently Joanne got worse and problems developed with some of the neighbors. Joanne was accused of stealing, not an uncommon accusation to be leveled at her. When I asked Cheryl why I needed to sue Joanne, she explained that while I was arguing over jury instructions, the police had taken her to a hospital for a physiological examination. Cheryl subsequently received a call about 10 p.m. The hospital was releasing Joanne and asked Cheryl to pick her up. At least at that point Cheryl drew the line. She used me as an excuse. She said, “Mark is in trial and he has my car.” That sounded like an unlikely excuse, since Cheryl has her own car, but at the time I guess it was good enough. Cheryl explained to me that in fact Joanne had been released, and found her way back to our property. Once “home,” Joanne nailed all the doors and windows shut and started barbecuing her meals in the bathtub.
In another example of my wife’s hands-on legal approach to landlording, one evening recently she received a call from an African-American tenant living in a mostly white neighborhood. One of the neighbor’s kids had broken our window and other neighbors were lodging complaints against our tenant as well. My wife was convinced racial animus was the driving force behind our tenant’s problems, so she called the police and demanded they go to the home of the kids who had broken the window to announce that the neighbor had to pay for the damage to our house. By the time Cheryl got me involved it was evening. We were at our tenant’s house and Cheryl was talking to the policeman. The policeman said that the neighbor agreed to pay for only half the damages to the window because she claimed kids other than hers were also involved. That was not sufficient for Cheryl, who proclaimed she was going to visit the neighbor. I looked at the policeman, very confident he was going to tell her under no circumstances should she do that. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Up to you, lady,” got in his car and drove away. I started shaking my head.
Cheryl wanted to know if I was going with her. Again, one of those no-option choices. Away we went. I followed Cheryl up the front stairs. She banged on the door and two teenage girls with attitude answered. Cheryl said she wanted to see their mother and the girls said she was busy. Cheryl announced that the girls better get their mother immediately or Cheryl was going in. The mother appeared. Cheryl ordered her to bring her six kids on to the porch. Cheryl then went into a vicious tongue-lashing about how the kids were compromising the welfare of the family and harming the mother, and that Cheryl fully intended to report “what was going on” in that house to the landlord who would evict the whole family. She then pointed to me and said, “You understand he’s a lawyer and he will give you more trouble than you have seen in your entire life.” By the time we left, the mother was crying and I was comparing Cheryl’s dress down of that family to the best of tirades I’d witnessed from some of the crusty old federal judges who were on the bench when I first started practicing law.
I forgot to mention that, since Joanne was doing things like fighting with and stealing from neighbors, not to mention cooking in her (my) bathtub, Cheryl received a letter from the city ordering her, as the owner of a “nuisance property,” to appear in court. I have a feeling it won’t be just Cheryl. Finally, before leaving work tonight, I got a call from the local paper wanting me to comment on the just finished three-week trial. It was good to get back to something simple.
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© 2017 Under Analysis, LLC. Under Analysis is a nationally syndicated column of the Levison Group. Mark Levison is a member of the law firm of Lashly & Baer. Contact Under Analysis by email at comments@levisongroup.com.
