But Is It L’Arte?

On the eve of trial, the district court granted a motion to withdraw filed by the attorneys for L’Arte de la Mode, Inc., but denied the company’s request for a continuance because it was the client’s fault they had not been paying their bills. The case was called to trial, but nobody appeared for L’Arte. The trial court therefore granted a default judgment for Neiman Marcus, awarding it more than $150,000 in compensatory damages and twice that amount for exemplary damages, all attributable to Neiman’s claim for money had and received.  L’Arte retained substitute counsel, but the trial court denied the company’s motion for new trial. The court of appeals reversed, holding that L’Arte had established all of the elements for a new trial.

The court of appeals analyzed the case under the venerable standards of Craddock v. Sunshine Bus Lines, Inc., 133 S.W.2d 124 (Tex. 1939), which requires the movant to establish that (1) the failure to appear was not intentional or the result of conscious indifference, but was the result of an accident or mistake, (2) the movant has a meritorious defense, and (3) granting the motion will occasion no delay or otherwise injure the plaintiff. L’Arte established the first element through the affidavit of its in-house counsel, who stated that L’Arte had not received either the attorneys’ motion to withdraw or the order granting the withdrawal. L’Arte also established that it had a meritorious defense through its contention that Wells Fargo actually holds Neiman’s money, thanks to its factoring arrangement with L’Arte. Finally, the court of appeals held that L’Arte had satisfactorily assured that a new trial would not injure Neiman Marcus by agreeing to pay its attorney fees incurred in obtaining the default judgment, despite Neiman’s objection that the promise was hollow in light of L’Arte’s inability to pay its own attorneys and its failure to post a bond to supersede the existing judgment. The court of appeals therefore reversed the default and remanded to the district court for a trial on the merits.

L’Arte de la Mode, Inc. v. Neiman Marcus Group, No. 05-11-01440-CV