Court Opinion

ID: 9809500
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 21:15:27.617571+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:32:18.528479
License: Public Domain

Merrimon, C. J.
(dissenting): The statute does not recognize or allow a practice that is observed by counsel and tolerated by the Courts whereby gentlemen of the bar, for their *603common convenience, agree with each other to extend the time for stating and settling cases on appeal to this Court, and in some other cases beyond that prescribed by the statute. This practice is solely for the ease and convenience of counsel, and is allowed when it cannot prejudice their clients. When such agreements are made in an action, they should be liberally interpreted as between the counsel making them, and not allowed to prejudice the parties to the action or either of them. Accident, mistake, misapprehension, sudden brief absence of the opposing counsel, and the like considerations, should not be allowed to determine the agreement, unless the delay should be unreasonable and seriously prejudice the party insisting upon a strict observance of it. The practice should be thus liberal, else the Courts should uniformly require a strict observance of the statute. In the present case, the time for filing amendments by the appellee to the case stated on appeal by the appellant was extended fifteen days. Such amendments were prepared by the appellee’s counsel, and steps were taken in good faith to serve the appellant’s counsel with them on the fifteenth day of the time so specified, but it so turned out that the latter was absent from his office, attending Court at a distance on that day, and, on that account, he was not so served until the day after the time specified expired. The appellant, hence, insists that the service was not within the time so agreed upon, and therefore the case stated by him is the case on appeal for this Court. I think there was a substantial compliance with the agreement. The appellee’s counsel attended to and prepared such amendments — he would have served the appellant’s counsel with them within the time agreed upon but for the latter’s absence — -he was served with them the next day, and the appellant could suffer no prejudice by the slight delay so occasioned.
It is suggested that the appellee’s counsel might have served the amendments within, the time by having the
*604Sheriff deliver them at the office of the appellant’s counsel in his absence. Such service would have had no legal effect. The statute makes no such provision — the agreement took the matter without the statute, and made it subject to the practice above pointed out. That practice, in my judgment, is not to be tolerated, unless it is subject to the just and liberal interpretation that I insist it must receive; otherwise, it may result, in possible cases that may frequently arise, in serious prejudice to litigants. Owens v. Phelps, 91 N. C., 253.
Per curiam. Motion allowed.