Page 3
Court of Appeal:
Denial of Trial Continuance Put Efficiency Before Justice
Plaintiff’s Lawyer Had Stepped Away From Case Less Than Six Weeks Before Trial Date
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The First District Court of Appeal has declared that it was an abuse of discretion to deny an unopposed motion for a continuance to an elderly and disabled plaintiff whose lawyer withdrew from the case less than six weeks before the trial date because his client declined a settlement offer.
Justice Douglas P. Miller of Div. Two authored the unpublished opinion, filed Thursday.
The opinion directs that a judgment entered in favor of defendant Jae Geon Son be vacated. That judgment followed San Francisco Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo's order granting a nonsuit after plaintiff Kourosh Eddie Ehteshami—who was forced to represent himself despite his professed inability to do so—floundered.
Massullo, who is now the court's presiding judge, on June 29, 2022, denied a continuance that was sought by Ehteshami to allow him time to find a new lawyer, saying:
"[M]y responsibility is to try cases. I'm a trial court. Cases are sent to me for trial. And so I need to move the cases along because there are so many cases now that we have to handle."
Two days earlier, Samuel K. Feng, then the presiding judge, in handling the master calendar, had also denied a continuance.
‘Arbitrary,’ ‘Capricious’
In his opening brief on appeal, prepared by attorneys David Eiseman and Nathan Sun of the San Francisco office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, Ehteshami argued:
“The denials of the requests for continuance on both June 27 and 29, 2022, constituted abuses of discretion because the trial court failed to properly account for all the relevant circumstances, including Plaintiffs abandonment by counsel shortly before trial and his indigent circumstances, and instead denied the requests arbitrarily and capriciously."
The brief also sets forth:
“[T]he denial had the practical effect of denying Plaintiff a fair hearing and amounted to a terminating sanction, forcing him to proceed to the trial by himself in violation of his constitutional right to be represented by counsel at trial. And a continuance would not have prejudiced Defendant at all, given that he had already stipulated to a continuance until September 2022~further highlighting the trial court's abuse of discretion in denying the continuance."
The plaintiff and the defendant were both Uber drivers at the time of their traffic accident. Son acknowledged liability and the issue was the amount of damages.
Miller’s Opinion
Miller wrote:
"Plaintiff was not someone who had chosen the perilous path of representing himself from the beginning of this litigation, and who thus accepted from the outset that as a pro per litigant he would be held to the same standard as an attorney....
"The withdrawal of counsel six weeks before trial may not be as dramatic as an attorney quitting on the Friday before a Monday trial, or an attorney suddenly taken ill. But it is not enough simply to assume that six weeks is 'enough time' for a litigant to find new counsel or else be expected to try the case pro per, without also taking into account the other circumstances of the case. But that is what appears to have happened here."
Need for Efficiency
He went to say:
“We are mindful of the trial court's need for efficiency, and appreciate the trial court's commitment that it was 'here to try cases,' even to the extent it advanced the trial by one day at the last minute because another case had been continued."
But efficiency, he said, must be balanced against countervailing considerations in order to serve the interests of justice. Miller pointed to the 2004 Court of Appeal opinion by Acting Presiding Justice Kenneth Yegan of this district's Div. Eight in Hernandez v. Superior Court in which it was observed:
"[E]fficiency is not an end in itself. Delay reduction and calendar management are required for a purpose: to promote the just resolution of cases on their merits."
‘Substantial Justice’
The justice also drew attention to another Court of Appeal decision, also cited by Yegan: Bahl v. Bank of America, decided in 2001 by the Fourth District's Div. Three. There, Justice Eileen Moore said that decisions on motions for a continuance "must be made in an atmosphere of substantial justice," adding:
"When the two policies collide head-on, the strong public policy favoring disposition on the merits outweighs the competing policy favoring judicial efficiency."
Those precepts were not adhered to in the preset case, Miller declared, saying that the "singular focus on six weeks" which Ehteshami had to find a new lawyer, "to the apparent exclusion of everything else, did not fairly take into account all of the facts and circumstances relevant to the case."
The opinion does not discuss Massullo's expressed perception that she was powerless to countermand Feng's denial of a continuance in the absence of new considerations. The case is Ehteshami v. Son, A166469.
Copyright 2025, Metropolitan News Company