Opinion
No. 85 Civ. 3006 (CSH).
May 26, 2005
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
The present posture of this case is that plaintiff has moved for reconsideration of the Court's dismissal of his complaint for failure to prosecute. Familiarity with all prior opinions and orders in the case is assumed. The three opinions most relevant to the present motion are reported at 2003 WL 21576161 ( "Valentine I"), 2004 WL 2496074 ( "Valentine II") and at 2005 WL 975919 ( "Valentine III").
I. BACKGROUND
Valentine II contains the order of dismissal to which plaintiff's motion for reconsideration is addressed. Valentine III directed a further submission from the plaintiff with respect to a draft settlement agreement which counsel for MetLife sent to plaintiff in November 1994. In particular, Valentine II directed plaintiff "to file and serve a supplementary affidavit or declaration, on or before May 13, 2005, describing the manner in which he `agreed' to the November 1994 agreement. Specifically, his statement should recite whether he signed the agreement, and, if he did, what he then did with it." 2005 WL 975919, at *4. Plaintiff has made a further submission, as has MetLife.
To summarize the relevant facts, plaintiff sued MetLife under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, as amended, 29 U.S.C. § 621 et seq. ("ADEA"), alleging that his involuntary termination in 1984 violated that federal statute. Upon being advised by counsel for the parties that settlement was imminent, in November 1986 the Court entered an order of discontinuance, dismissing the case with prejudice, but providing counsel for plaintiff the option of restoring the case to the docket within ninety days if final settlement was not achieved. Upon applications by counsel for plaintiff, the time for restoring the case to the docket was extended twice, the second time without time limitation (the Court simply endorsed a letter request from plaintiff's counsel for more time).
While the record shows that the parties, acting through counsel, were in repeated contact with each other during the succeeding years, they dispute what transpired. Plaintiff contends that he repeatedly accepted offers of settlement MetLife made to him which MetLife then failed to consummate. Thus plaintiff says in his declaration dated May 12, 2005 at ¶ 6 that "MetLife's pattern of making offers to me and then disappearing from the scene upon my acceptance thereof is clear." MetLife contends that the parties never agreed on the terms of a settlement. Thus MetLife's then counsel says in a supplemental affidavit at ¶ 17:
MetLife never pulled an offer off the table that Plaintiff had accepted. Rather, Plaintiff never accepted any of MetLife offers but, instead, "agreed" to them if MetLife would increase certain monetary payments. MetLife did not agree to make the requested increases. MetLife's refusal to accept Plaintiff's counter-offers was never a withdrawal of an agreed upon offer.
II. DISCUSSION
At this juncture it is useful to recall certain principles of law. If a party plaintiff enters into what he regards as a binding monetary settlement with the defendant, and the defendant reneges on the settlement and does not pay, the plaintiff has two choices. He may revive and proceed upon his original cause of action, or he may sue to enforce the settlement agreement. If the plaintiff chooses the second option, the case will be governed by the law of contract. "New York courts have recognized that settlement agreements are contractual in nature; accordingly, litigation regarding such agreements must be governed by rules which control contractual litigation." Ediciones Quiroga, S.L. v. Fall River Music, Inc., No. 93 Civ. 3914, 1996 WL 148363 (S.D.N.Y. April 2, 1996), at *2. The Second Circuit has repeatedly applied that principle to litigation involving settlement agreements. See, e.g., Ciaramella v. Reader's Digest Association, Inc., 131 F.3d 320, 322 (2d Cir. 1997) ("New York relies on settled common law contract principles to determine when parties to a litigation intended to form a binding agreement.") (citation and footnote omitted); Winston v. Mediafare Entertainment Corp., 777 F.2d 78 (2d Cir. 1985) (New York contract law applied to action to enforce a settlement agreement alleged to have been reached by the parties to litigation).A striking aspect of the case at bar is that, during all the years that have passed since the Court entered its conditional order of discontinuance in November 1986, the plaintiff never formally requested the Court either to set the underlying case down for trial or to enforce a particular settlement agreement. Whatever dialogue might have been taking place between plaintiff, MetLife, and their counsel, the Court heard nothing about the case until plaintiff wrote a personal letter to the Court dated June 6, 2003 which stated: "Three separate times I have agreed to a settlement proposed by MetLife and thereafter, each time, MetLife has refused to finalize our agreement." Plaintiff asked the Court to schedule a "settlement conference." Valentine I, 2003 WL 21576161, at *1.
During this six and one-half year interval between the November 1986 order of discontinuance and plaintiff's June 6, 2003 letter, the Clerk had administratively closed the case. The Court responded to plaintiff's letter by directing the Clerk to restore the case to the Court's active calendar, and made an order of reference to Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman for the principal purpose of exploring the possibilities of settlement with the parties. Judge Freeman was unable to arrange a disposition, the reference was terminated, and the case was returned to this Court.
At that point MetLife moved to dismiss the case under Rule 41(b), Fed.R.Civ.P., for the plaintiff's failure to prosecute the action, or alternatively, on the equitable ground of laches. In Valentine II I granted MetLife's motion under Rule 41(b) and found it unnecessary to reach the question of laches. 2004 WL 2496074, at *6. The Court dismissed plaintiff's complaint with prejudice. Plaintiff's present motion for reconsideration followed, as did the further submissions the Court directed in Valentine III, described supra.
Upon this expanded record, I will consider whether plaintiff's motion for reconsideration should be granted, the order of dismissal directed in Valentine II be vacated, and the case be allowed to proceed, either on plaintiff's underlying claim against MetLife or to enforce a settlement agreement. I will consider these two theories of recovery separately.
The Underlying Claim
Plaintiffs' complaint asserted his underlying claim against MetLife. Valentine II dismissed that complaint for failure to prosecute, pursuant to Rule 41(b).
Plaintiff's motion for reconsideration of that opinion and order fails to satisfy the requirements of Local Civil Rule 6.3, which governs such motions. Under Rule 6.3, reconsideration of an opinion "will generally be denied unless the moving party can point to controlling decisions or data that the court overlooked — matters, in other words, that might reasonably be expected to alter the conclusion reached by the court." Shrader v. CSX Transport, Inc., 70 F.3d 255, 257 (2d Cir. 1995). Reconsideration "should not be granted where the moving party seeks solely to relitigate an issue already decided." Id. Nor may the moving party use such a motion "to advance new facts, issues or arguments not previously presented to the court." Bank Leumi Trust Co. of New York v. Istim, Inc., 902 F.Supp. 46, 48 (S.D.N.Y. 1995). These limitations are designed to ensure finality and prevent the rule from becoming a vehicle by which a losing party may examine a decision "and then plug the gaps of a lost motion with additional matters." Carolco Pictures, Inc. v. Sirota, 700 F.Supp. 169, 170 (S.D.N.Y. 1988).
In the case at bar, plaintiff's motion for reconsideration makes no effort to point to controlling court decisions that the Court overlooked in Valentine II. Indeed, the motion is not accompanied by any memorandum of counsel (as Rule 6.3 requires); it is supported only by an additional affidavit from plaintiff (which the Rule forbids). That affidavit expands upon what plaintiff perceives to be MetLife's tactic in the case, originally described in plaintiff's affidavit opposing MetLife's motion to dismiss the complaint: obtaining plaintiff's agreements to a series of settlement offers and then failing to consummate them. However, assuming without deciding that is what occurred (and MetLife denies it), this avails plaintiff nothing on the issue of failure to prosecute within the meaning of Rule 41(b). If MetLife withdrew settlement offers or wrongfully failed to consummate them, plaintiff could have reasserted his underlying claim and asked the Court to restore the case to the active calendar at any time. Inaction for a period of six and a half years is too long. It constitutes a "failure of the plaintiff to prosecute," as that phrase is used in the Rule, and the retirement or death of six of MetLife's witnesses to the underlying facts, see Valentine II, 2004 WL 2496074, at *4, demonstrates that "MetLife would be severely prejudiced should it be required to defend this lawsuit at this time," id., a key element under the Rule militating in favor of dismissal. Plaintiff says in his most recent affidavit at ¶ 4 that "I have an even bigger problem than MetLife since it knows where current or retired employees live and I do not," but that is beside the point. It was for plaintiff to move the case along in the Court if not satisfied by events, and the Rule focuses, naturally enough, upon prejudice to a defendant resulting from a plaintiff's failure to proseucute his case with reasonable diligence.
Plaintiff also expresses his "clear belief that the Court had given us unlimited time to resolve this matter." Affidavit on motion for reconsideration at ¶ 4. This is, one supposes, a reference to the Court's "So Ordered" endorsement of the letter from plaintiff's counsel in April 1987, "asking for an additional, unspecified time to reach a settlement with the defendant." Valentine II, 2004 WL 2496074, at *1. But plaintiff was represented by counsel throughout most if not all of this period; and no attorney, cognizant of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, could have reasonably believed that the case could be left inactive in the Court for six and a half years without implicating the failure to prosecute provisions of Rule 41(b).
In any event, the more reasonable interpretation of the Court's April 1987 endorsement would be that the extension of time thereby granted was for the length of time granted by the two preceding orders, namely, ninety days.
Accordingly I adhere to the holding in Valentine II that the plaintiff's complaint and his underlying claim must be dismissed under Rule 41(b) for failure to prosecute.
As in Valentine II, I do not reach MetLife's alternative basis for dismissal, the equitable doctrine of laches. I note, however, that the application of that doctrine to the case at bar is doubtful. One of the cases cited by MetLife, Liebowitz v. Elsevier Science Ltd., 927 F.Supp. 688, 704 (S.D.N.Y. 1996), states: "Laches is a defense only against claims in equity and not at law." Plaintiff's claim against MetLife for money damages under the ADEA is essentially one at law. Moreover, it arises under a federal statute, and in Ivani Contracting Corp., 103 F.3d 257 (2d Cir. 1997), the Second Circuit held that the doctrine of laches was inapplicable to such an action timely filed under a federal statute. "The prevailing rule, then, is that when a plaintiff brings a federal statutory claim seeking legal relief, laches cannot bar that claim, at least where the statute contains an express limitations period within which the action is timely. . . . We therefore cannot allow laches to bar Ivani's claim, which was otherwise timely filed under § 1983's three-year limitations period as borrowed from analogous state law." Id. at 260, 261. Most laches defenses are asserted in the context of a plaintiff's delay in commencing suit. In the case at bar, the delay in question relates to plaintiff's inaction in prosecuting the case after it was timely filed under the ADEA. This is the sort of delay specifically addressed by Rule 41(b), whose emphasis upon resulting prejudice to a defendant echoes an essential element of the laches doctrine. The case at bar is more properly adjudicated under Rule 41(b).
Enforcement of a Settlement Agreement
The purpose of the Court's decision in Valentine III was to focus the parties' attention on the possibility that plaintiff might have an enforceable claim under a settlement agreement to which both parties consented to be bound.
The expanded record does not resolve that dispute; and plaintiff, while referring in his affidavits to a number of proposals by MetLife to which he agreed, has never identified a particular settlement agreement which he contends is binding upon MetLife. But this issue need not be further pursued, since it is apparent from the record that any claim by plaintiff to enforce a settlement agreement would be time barred.
Plaintiff's initial affidavit, after describing various settlement offers throughout the years, says at ¶ 7: "Annexed hereto is a copy of the offer proposed by Mr. Steer in November of 1994 to which I agreed. I never heard from MetLife again." It follows that any settlement agreement binding upon the parties was entered into not later than November of 1994. As noted supra, the law regards settlement agreements as contracts, and "litigation regarding such agreements must be governed by rules which control contractual litigation." Ediciones Quiroga, 1996 WL 148363, at *2. One of those rules is N.Y.C.P.L.R. § 213(2), which provides a six-year statute of limitations in contract actions. Accordingly any action available to plaintiff to enforce a settlement agreement with MetLife became time barred after the year 2000.
III. CONCLUSION
The fact is that plaintiff took no action in this Court after April 1987, either on his underlying claim or to enforce a settlement agreement, until his letter of June 6, 2003, asking for a settlement conference under judicial supervision. That conference was arranged, under the supervision of Judge Freeman, but nothing came of it. For the reasons stated in Valentine II and in this Opinion, plaintiff has no viable claim remaining to him.
It is impossible not to sympathize with the plaintiff. His father and two of his uncles retired from MetLife, and plaintiff himself spent more than 30 years with the company, which by then he must have regarded as part of his extended family, when he was involuntarily terminated. But I am constrained by the facts and the law to adhere to adhere to the direction in Valentine II that the complaint be dismissed with prejudice.
Accordingly, and for the foregoing reasons, plaintiff's motion for reconsideration is denied.
It is SO ORDERED.