Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)

Citation: Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)
Parent Document: Douglas v. Kriegsfeld Corp., 884 A.2d 1109 (2005)
Jurisdiction: DC (municipal)
Effective Date: 2005-10-13
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1472683/douglas-v-kriegsfeld-corp/ ↗

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Judge Glickman, like Judge Schwelb, stresses the difficulty that the tenant’s counsel had in finding his client during the days immediately before trial — a situation, he says, that meant “a meaningful dialogue of the sort envisioned by the majority ceased to be possible.” He then adds a footnote stating, with apparent reference *1143to the two weeks in June before trial, that the tenant’s “unavailability for reasonable accommodation discussions ... was determinative of everything, for it made it impossible for her counsel even to propose a reasonable accommodation for the landlord’s consideration.” Those two statements ignore that the landlord’s counsel concededly had refused any dialogue with the tenant’s counsel for a period of months after a request for reasonable accommodation had been made, and they further ignore the landlord’s obligation to commence that dialogue promptly, and certainly enough before a trial to permit a good faith exchange. Although he refers to the tenant’s absence for “several weeks” before the April 17 pretrial conference, Judge Glickman does not claim that the tenant was unavailable during the entire period when the landlord was aware of her request, through counsel, for a stay coupled with a D.C. government cleanup. Significantly, he does not dispute the evidence that the tenant was available for a meeting with D.C. government representatives Sutton and Byrd on June 5, 2002, within days after the landlord first acknowledged the request for reasonable accommodation. She presumably would have been available to her counsel then as well. Furthermore, as noted above, there was evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that the landlord declined in any event to engage in meaningful discussion with the tenant’s counsel toward reasonable accommodation — the kind of lawyer-to-lawyer discussion that did not depend on the tenant’s presence at every session. By focusing primarily on the period immediately before trial, therefore, our colleague overlooks the tenant’s availability from time to time during the much longer period after accommodation had been requested and the landlord had an obligation to respond. Accordingly, by emphasizing that a “meaningful dialogue ceased to be possible,” our colleague in effect is claiming that the landlord won a game of “gotcha”: the tenant’s apparent unavailability from the day after she met with Sutton and Byrd (June 6) to the trial date (Junel7) erased all legal significance from the landlord’s own multi-month unavailability. The law applicable here does not work that way.

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