ST. PAUL, Minn. (CN) — A divided Minnesota Supreme Court issued a complicated pair of opinions and dissents Wednesday in an effort to answer a critical but dry question for Minnesota litigants: what, exactly, is an “action,” and how does it start?
Two separate majorities of the high court — both joined by Justice Barry Anderson — took conflicting stances on the issue, resulting in a rare novelty: two partially discordant “opinion-dissents.”
The legal question came before the court in November as part of a dispute over insurance coverage for damage caused by a 2017 hailstorm. While a homeowners’ association in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park served its insurance company with a summons and complaint in 2019, the complaint only made it into court as an attachment to an affidavit included with a memorandum filed four months later.
That failure to file the complaint, defendant firm Hiscox Insurance argued, should have been fatal to the HOA’s action because of a Minnesota rule of civil procedure requiring that “any action” be filed with the court within one year of “commencement against any party.” The homeowners’ association, Glen Edin of Edinburgh, argued that an answer Hiscox filed met the “action” filing requirement.
A Supreme Court majority consisting of Justices Anderson, Natalie Hudson and Paul Thissen as well as Chief Justice Lorie Gildea agreed with Hiscox’s contention that filing an “action” refers to filing the summons and complaint.
“We believe that Glen Edin’s approach would interpret Rule 5.04(a) in a vacuum and ignore the surrounding text and context of the rule,” Hudson wrote in her opinion-dissent. “Glen Edin ignores that under Rule 5.04(a), not only does an ‘action’ need to be ‘filed,’ but it also needs to be ‘commenced.’”
Hudson finished: “We conclude that filing an ‘action’ under Rule 5.04(a) refers to filing the summons and complaint.”
A different majority, however, found that Glen Edin’s filing of a copy of the complaint as an attachment to an affidavit supporting a memorandum sufficed to meet the rule’s one-year requirement. Justice Margaret Chutich, backed by Justices Anderson, Gordon Moore and Anne McKeig, penned an opinion in which she argued that, even when applying Hudson’s summons-and-complaint requirement, requiring that the summons and complaint be filed independently from other documents “would in effect add a technical filing requirement beyond the text of rule 5.04(a) and undercut the judiciary’s goal of resolving disputes on the merits.”
“Glen Edin still placed the necessary documents in the hands of the district court only four months after the action was commenced,” Chutich noted, “apprising the court of the nature of the action and content of the complaint. Glen Edin’s filing allowed the district court to be involved in case management before the action grew stale.”
Hudson, in the dissent portion of her ruling, took issue with this contention.
“Liberal construction does not require an unreasonable construction,” she wrote, “and here, it would be unreasonable to conclude that Glen Edin satisfied Rule 5.04(a) by filing its summons and complaint as an exhibit to an affidavit to a memorandum in support of a motion ancillary to the dispute contained in the complaint.”
Hudson continued her dissent from the second group of justices’ reasoning.
“By allowing the summons and complaint here to be filed in a proceeding ‘pertaining to the same action,’ the court muddies the plain filing requirements” established by the rule, Hudson wrote. “Under the court’s reasoning, a plaintiff could file thousands of pages of exhibits (or any document for that matter), and as long as the summons and complaint are tucked somewhere in that deluge of paper, the dictates of 5.04(a) are met. I cannot see how enlisting district courts in scavenger hunts for summonses and complaints in the record advances the efficient use of judicial resources.”
In the end, it appears that the appellate court’s decision to reverse dismissal stands, as the high court overall agrees that the summons and complaints were adequately filed with the court within an appropriate amount of time.
Attorneys for Glen Edin and Hiscox did not respond to requests for comment early Wednesday afternoon.
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