A Bank or Landlord seeking to avoid delay by using District Court instead of Housing Court will not avoid the required delay for prosecuting an eviction case.
It has been brought to our attention that entities seeking to evict people may be trying to circumvent the Housing Court being closed by going to District Court.
First, everyone is reminded that if an eviction/summary process is filed in District Court, you have a right to file for it to removed back to Housing Court, and if you so file, it has to be transferred over to the Housing Court. However, at this point an evicting entity attempting to get around the Housing Courts being closed and therefore filing in a District Court will still be postponed.
It appears from the District Court standing order of 2-20 under III paragraph D, that if someone attempts to file an eviction case and follows the rules (uniform summary process rules) for filling out the summons & complaint and scheduling a hearing, the hearing’s normally scheduled, say, 10 days after the date on which the court case has to be entered (‘entry date”).
The standing order will then require that they wait at least 60 days from that date before they will get a scheduled date for the hearing that they listed on the summons and complaint. Therefore, the date required for answer and discovery should likewise be postponed even though that’s not explicit in the order.
You will not get penalized by not e-filing your answer and discovery forms by the answer date listed on the court summons and complaint. Please pass that information along as well.
Thanks for people continuing to ask me (Grace Ross, MAAPL Coordinator) questions. I will continue to research and provide answers to our broad community here on the MAAPL website.
