Opinion ID: 3000864
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Motion to Add Parties

Text: Rule 15(a) requires that leave to amend a pleading “shall be freely given when justice so requires.” FED. R. CIV. P. 15(a). But there is a catch: O’Brien sought to add parties to the complaint more than two years after the statute of limitations had run against those persons. O’Brien must also satisfy Rule 15(c), which allows the amended pleading to relate back to the date of the original pleading under certain limited conditions. The district court’s decision to deny a motion to amend a pleading is reviewed for abuse of discretion. Conyers v. Abitz, 416 F.3d 580, 586 (7th Cir. 2005). The text of Rule 15(c) requires that the newly added parties must have had notice of the action within the time period for service of process, they must have known that “but for a mistake concerning the identity of the proper party, the action would have been brought against” them, and the amended pleading must concern the same conduct, transaction, or occurrence. FED. R. CIV. P. 15(c)(2)-(3). O’Brien’s Motion to Add Parties addressed the question of whether the alleged conduct arose out of the same transaction or occurrence. R. 49 ¶ 23. But it did not address the question of whether the new parties were on notice of the original suit or had knowledge that they were the rightful defendants. Instead, O’Brien’s argument relied heavily on the admittedly unseemly level of neglect demonstrated by his first attorney. The defendants did devote some portion of their pleading to the question of whether an error on the part of the plaintiff should allow an unsuspecting defendant to be added long after the statute of limitations had passed. R. 50 ¶ 8. No. 06-3064 5 In Delgado-Brunet v. Clark, 93 F.3d 339, 344 (7th Cir. 1996), we addressed the question of whether a prisoner’s civil suit may be amended after the statute of limitations had run in order to name new individual defendants who were not on notice of the original complaint. Although Delgado-Brunet was a Bivens action, the opinion made clear that the analysis was applicable to claims arising under § 1983 as well. Id. Rule 15(c) and Delgado-Brunet clearly instructed the district court that the amended complaint should not have related back. The appellant repeats here many of the same arguments that he made below, focusing on the neglect of O’Brien’s original attorney. But the question for us is not whether we would make the same decision that the district court did. We must be convinced that the decision by the district court was fundamentally wrong. Chavez v. Ill. State Police, 251 F.3d 612, 628 (7th Cir. 2001). We see no reason why the order denying the motion was an abuse of discretion. We are not faced with the question of whether it would have been an abuse of discretion if the district court had allowed new parties to be named at the time that the suit was revived in the spring of 2004. We are well aware of the unusual level of professional incompetence demonstrated by Davidson in his handling of this case in 2003. Whether it would have been within the range of the district court’s discretion to allow those new parties to be added once O’Brien’s case was being handled by more diligent lawyers is a question for another case. We hold simply that in this case, where O’Brien escaped the results of his lawyer’s incompetence via a Rule 60 motion in June 2004 and was given a second bite at the apple, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying him a third bite at the apple after an additional nine months had passed. 6 No. 06-3064