1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

DEBORAH A. TRUDEL, et al. , Plaintiffs, v. Civil Action No. 15-1966 (JEB) SUNTRUST BANK, et al. , Defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION This case began decades ago, with the assassinations of Yevgeny i Scherban, a Ukrainian businessman, and Nadejda Nikitina , his wife. Scherban left mor e than $100 million behind, along with three sons — Evgenyi, Ruslan, and Yevgen — who have since been hunting for their missing inheritance. As part of t hat quest, they sued Defendan t SunTrust Bank, which allegedly mishandled an account holding a s liver of Scherban’s fortune. In its most recent Opinion, the Court granted summary judgment in favor of SunTrust, “thereby c losing the book on the Bank’s role in this unfortunate tale.” Trudel v. SunTrust Bank (Trude l II), 2018 WL 564557, at *1 (D.D.C. Jan. 25, 2018). Or so it thought. Plaintiffs now seek to write an epilogue, asking the Court to reconsider its decisi on or accept their proposed Third Amended Complaint. The Court will decline both invitations.
I. Background The Court has already provided a detailed account of the Scherb an family history, see Trudel v. SunTrust Bank (Trudel I), 223 F. Supp. 3d 71, 76-81 ( D.D.C. 2016). For today, it suffices to say that around 1994, S cherban opened a savings acc ount (with terminal digits 5216) with SunTrust at its branch in B oca Raton, Florida. Plaintiff s allege this account once housed2 more than a million dollars, but over time, its funds mysteriou sly dwindled. To wit, a statement dated March 31, 2001, shows $3,773.04 remaining, yet SunTrust h as little explanation of how hundreds of thousands of dollars vanished. See ECF No. 71-2 (P l. Reply to Mot. to Reopen Discovery). In 2003, the Bank apparently closed the account, b ut it again offers f ew details as to what happened to the $3,773 balance. On November 6, 2015, the three sons brought suit in this Court, alleging inter alia , that SunTrust had mishandled the account from 1996 to 2003. After D eborah Trudel (the representative of Nikitina’s estate) was subbed in for Evgenyi and Yevgen as a proper plaintiff, the Court dismissed the lion’s share of the Complaint, holding that ten of the twelve counts were either untimely or had failed to s tate a claim. That left only two counts standing — one for accounting and one for fraudulent concealment — and on January 25, 2018, the Court granted summary judgment in favor of S unTrust on both. See Trudel II, 2018 WL 564557. Plaintiffs now ask the Court to either (1) reconsider its ruling on the fr audulent-concealment count or (2) reopen the case so that they can amend their Second Amended Com plaint. See ECF No. 104 (Mot. to Alter Judgment).
II. Legal Standard Ordinarily, leave to amend a com plaint under Federal Rule of Ci vil Procedure 15(a) “shall be freely given when justi ce so requires.” Under Rule 1 5, a district court must provide sufficient reason to deny leave to amend, such as “undue delay, bad faith or dilatory motive . . . [or] repeated failure to cure de ficiencies by [previous] amendm ents.” Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 182 (1962). The entry of final judgment, however, is a ga me changer. At that point, a plaintiff can amend his “complaint only by filing . . . [a] mot ion to alter or amend a judgment” under Rule 59(e) “combined with a Rule 15(a) motion requesting leave of court to amend [his]3 complaint.” Firestone v. Firestone, 76 F.3d 1205, 1208 (D.C. C ir. 1996). “Rule 15(a)’s liberal standard . . . governs once the court has vacated the judgment, . . . [b]ut to vacate the judgment, Appellants must first s atisfy Rule 59(e)’s more stringent stand ard.” Id. “A Rule 59(e) motion is ‘discr etionary’ and need not be grante d unless the district court finds that there is an ‘interven ing change of c ontrolling law, the availability of new evidence, or the need to correct a clear error or prevent manifest injustice .’” Id. (citation omitted); see also 11 C. Wright & A. Miller, Fed. Prac. & Proc. Civ. § 2810.1 at 158- 62 (3d ed. 2017) (noting “four basic grounds” for Rule 59(e) mo tion include “manifest errors o f law or fact,” “newly discovered or previously unavailable evidenc e,” “manifest injustice,” and “intervening change in controlling law”).
III. Analysis Unhappy with the Court’s ruling, P laintiffs move for reconsider ation on three grounds. Generously construed, their arguments fall into three camps: (1 ) manifest injustice; (2) manifest error of law and fact; and (3) ne wly discovered evidence. The Court discusses each in turn.
A. Manifest Injustice Plaintiffs believe the Court shoul d re-open the case because of a “[r]egrettable procedural surprise”: they filed only a “p rovisional” opposition to SunTru st’s Motion for Summary Judgment, they say, and expected e ither a future status confere nce or further discovery before a ruling. See Mot. at 1-3. This ar gument has several flaws. Fi rst, the status conference. Trudel and Ruslan latch onto a Minute Or der, which advised, “At the ne xt status conference (yet to be set), Plaintiffs shall provide further information on service o f Defendant Gwynfe.” Minute Order of Sept. 27, 2017. That status conf erence, however, related to a wholly different Defendant — Gwynfe Holding Ltd., a Virgin Isl ands corporation that has neve r appeared in this case — and4 whether Plaintiffs could effect service on it. The Court need not have detained SunTrust’s summary-judgment motion for a status hearing on that separate i ssue. Second, the Court did consider whether to defer a summary-judgment ruling to allow ad ditional discovery. It declined to do so, reasoning that after a lengthy discovery process, it had “all the information needed to rule on summary judgment, and none of Plaintiffs’ proposed aven ues could yield facts that would change the outcome.” Trudel II, 2018 WL 564557, at *12. Third, to the extent Plaintiffs wanted to amend their Complaint in light of what they had already discovered, they should have moved to do so. As the Co urt explained, their attempt to “reserve[]” the right to amend t hrough summary-judgment briefin g was improper, id.; there is simply no such thing as a “provi sional” summary-judgment opposi tion. In any event, the Court ultimately addressed Plaintiffs’ newest theory — namely, that S unTrust closed their account with at least $3,773 remaining and fraudul ently concealed that fact by failing to escheat the balance to Florida. Id. at *6. Although the Court noted the addition was procedurally improper, it nevertheless went on to conclude that any such claim would be t ime-barred under Florida’s 12- year statute of repose. Id., a t *6-7. Not surprisingly, Plain tiffs also challenge that holding, to which the Court now turns.
B. Manifest Error Trudel and Ruslan attack the C ourt’s time-bar holding on two gr ounds. They first criticize the Court for addressing Florida’s statute of repose sua sponte . They have scoured Defendant’s brief “with a pencil and eye’s perception,” they cl aim, yet the term “repose” is nowhere to be found in SunTrust’s summary-judgment briefing. S ee Mot. at 13. True enough. As the Court explained, however, a statute-of-repose defense is “an absolute juri sdictional bar to5 a tardily filed claim,” so it ha d an affirmative duty to consid er whether Plaintiffs’ claims were time-barred on that ground. T rudel II, 2018 WL 564557, at *7 ( citation omitted). Nor should the holding have been a “shocking surprise,” as Plai ntiffs claim. See Mot. at 6, 13-14. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, they similarly conte nded that “SunTrust closed [the 5216] account in January 2003” and failed to “giv[e] that uncla imed property to the State of Florida.” Trudel I, 223 F. Supp. 3d at 86. At that time, they brought eight common-law counts related to these acts, and the C ourt rejected each as time-barr ed under the applic able statute of limitations or repose. Id. at 90. Having tried to shoehorn th e theory into another count, Plaintiffs should have anticipated that the same timeliness questions migh t arise. Second, Trudel and Ruslan ask the Court to revisit its decision because SunTrust has not proven that the 5216 account was empty when closed. See Mot. a t 15 (“[T]here is no evidence as though there were no moneys on the account at the time of it s closure.”) (emphasis omitted). In other words, they believe that “a small amount of $3,773, mo st likely, did remain on Account x5216 on the day of its closing, allegedly on January 22, 2003. ” Id. at 17. This argument, however, fundamentally misundersta nds this Court’s holding. In granting summary judgment, the Court assumed, as Plaintiffs alleged, that SunTrust closed the 5216 account with money in it. That is, it accepted that “Defendant’s last culpable act was in January 22, 2003, when it allegedly closed the 5216 account without either a) escheating the [remai ning funds] to Florida or b) informing Plaintiffs that money remained.” Trudel II, 2018 WL 564557, at *7 (emphasis added). Even then, however, “the time limit expired by January 22, 2015 , ten months before the current lawsuit arrived.” Id.6 C. New Evidence Finally, Plaintiffs provide a la undry list of purportedly newly discovered evidence, each incident of which occurred withi n Florida’s twelve-year statute of repose. They are:

 December 2003: SunTrust told Jame s Weber, an attorney in the pr obate manner, that it had no “assets to which Nikitina’s estate would be entitled.”

 December 2003: Yevgen, one of the sons, visited SunTrust’s Boc a Raton branch and was told there were not accounts or assets associated with Nikitina or Ruslan.

 October 2005: Yevgen again vis ited the Boca Raton branch and re ceived the same response.
 April 2008: Leslaw Hetmanczyk, an investigator retained by Evge nyi and Ruslan, visited the Boca Raton branch and received the same response.

 May 2011: Hetmanczyk again visite d the Boca Raton branch and re ceived the same response.
 October 2013: Evgenyi visited SunT rust’s office in New York Cit y and received the same response. See Mot. 7-12. Trudel and Ruslan claim these ne w allegations require the Courtto vacate its judgment and allow them leave to amend under Rule 15. For the Court to reopen the case, however, the party seeking relief “must have been justifiably ignorant of [t he newly discovered evidence] despite due diligence.” Lightfoot v. Dist. of Columbia, 555 F. Supp. 2d 61, 68 (D.D.C. 2008) (quoting United States v. I nt’l Bhd. of Teamsters, 247 F.3d 370 , 392 (2d Cir. 2001)). The majority of Plaintiffs’ “new” ev idence relates to actions taken by the three sons. Each was originally a plaintiff in this action (and, indeed, Ruslan rema ins one), and all were represented by the same lawyer who has continue d prosecuting the case. Furthe r, each previously provided multiple affidavits in this case. See, e.g., ECF No. 10-1 (Rus lan); No. 10-2 (Evgenyi); No. 10-3 (Yevgen). It is not justifiable that counsel failed to uneart h (or at least plead) these additional allegations during three years of litigation. Perhaps recognizing as much, Pla intiffs focus entirely on Hetma nczyk in their Reply. They there maintain that the Court should tr eat his testimony a s newly discovered because7 neither “Plaintiffs nor their couns el have control over Hetmanc zyk.” Reply at 2-3. This claim, however, ignores the fact that Plaintiff did obtain and file an affidavit from the investigator on August 9, 2016 — well before this C ourt granted summary judgmen t. See ECF No. 40-3 (First Hetmancyzk Affidavit). Trudel and Ruslan now suggest that as a former police officer, Hetmanczyk was not inclined to be “talkative” with them, and th at their counsel did not in fact know of his 2008 and 2011 inquires at t he Bank. See Reply at 2 . This excuse fa lls flat, as the point is that counsel should have discovered this evidence. It was Plaintiffs who hired Hetmanczyk and they were thus w ell equipped to demand relevant information. See ECF No. 104-3 (Second Hetmanczyk Affidavit), ¶ 12 (noting he had discussed his inquires in “subsequent meetings” with Ruslan and Evgenyi in Ukraine). The Court there fore sees no justifiable basis for failing to introduce his testimony until judgment was entered. Plaintiffs protest that in ev aluating their proposed Third Ame nded Complaint, the Court should ignore Rule 59 and look only t o Rule 15(a)’s more libera l standard, see Mot. 3-7, but the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Firesto ne is directly to the contrary . See 76 F.3d at 1208. In any event, the result would not change. It is well established that undue delay “is a valid reason to reject a party’s attempt to add a new theo ry of liability to a complaint .” Elkins v. District of Columbia, 690 F.3d 554, 565 (D.C. Cir. 2012). “In a post-judgment situati on, delay without e xplanation is sufficient reason to deny a moti on to amend.” Figgie Int’l Inc . v. Miller, 966 F.2d 1178, 1181 (7th Cir. 1992) (denying leave t o amend even if the “Rule 59(e) motion [were] evaluated under the standards governing Rule 15( a)”). As just explained, Plain tiffs offer no compelling reasons for their delay, and they certain ly cannot attribute it to SunT rust. But allowing them to go back to the drawing board now — after pr otracted discovery and a dec ision on summary judgment — would be highly prejudicial to t he Bank. See Atchinson v. Dist rict of Columbia, 73 F.3d 418,8 426 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (“Consideratio n of whether delay is undue . . . should generally take into account the actions of other par ties and the possibility of any resulting prejudice.”).
IV. Conclusion For the foregoing reasons, the Court will deny Plaintiffs’ Moti on for Reconsideration and for Leave to Amend. It will issue a contemporaneous Order so s tating.

/s/ James E. Boasberg JAMES E. BOASBERG United States District Judge Date: April 4, 2018