METHODOLOGY · THE DOCKET
How The Docket is built.
The Docket is a catalogue of court cases involving New York condominium and cooperative boards — what the dispute was, how long it took, what it cost, and whether it is even finished. It exists to price something New York has never measured: what an owner must spend to enforce a right the state will not enforce for them.
This page explains what goes in, what stays out, and what these numbers cannot tell you. Read it before the data. Every limitation below is one we would rather state ourselves than have pointed out to us.
THE PREMISE
Every case here is a remedy that should not have needed a courthouse.
A Florida owner refused access to their association’s records files a complaint with the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. The statute gives the association ten working days, creates a presumption that a longer delay was willful, sets damages at $50 a day, and shifts attorney fees to whoever prevails.
A New York condominium owner refused the same records hires a lawyer. Real Property Law § 339-w entitles them to records of receipts and expenditures and the vouchers authorizing payments. It sets no deadline, imposes no penalty, shifts no fees, and names no agency. It is one paragraph long.
Same right. Same violation. Two prices. The Docket measures the difference, case by case.
That is why the buckets on this site are organised around the gap that forced the case rather than around villains. Of the 14 offense categories in the catalogue, the number with a New York agency that will hear the complaint is 1.
LANGUAGE
What we never say.
No one on this site is described as guilty of anything. Guilt is a criminal concept. These are civil cases, and civil cases produce findings of liability, declarations of rights, sanctions, and dismissals. Where a court has decided something, we say what it decided and quote it.
Three categories are kept strictly apart, in the database schema and not merely in the prose, because collapsing them is how a project like this becomes defamatory:
A finding
A court decided the question. Recorded as a finding against a board, for a board, split, a sanction, or an agency determination. Each row names which.
A settlement
The parties resolved it without any admission of liability. This is not a finding and is never counted alongside one.
An open case
Pleadings only. These are allegations, not findings, and are labelled that way wherever they appear.
A separate flag records whether the merits were reached at all. An appellate court reversing a dismissal has held that a claim may proceed — on a motion to dismiss it is required to assume the allegations are true. That is not evidence anyone did anything. Where that flag is false, the page says so on the case itself.
Entities are named: boards, managing agents, law firms, sponsor LLCs. Individuals appear only in case captions, because a citation cannot be verified without them, and our commentary stays on the structure rather than the person.
TIME
Four clocks, not one.
“How long did it take” hides the most important interval. We measure four.
| Interval | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Occurrence → first demand | How long the owner tried to resolve it internally. |
| First demand → filing | The guardrail gap. Months spent with a live grievance and nowhere to take it. In Florida, Virginia and Nevada this is where the dispute ends. |
| Filing → decision | Court queue and motion practice. |
| Decision → final order | Appeals, and the gap between winning and compliance. |
A separate field records whether the harm continued while the case ran — whether the facade kept shedding, the elevator stayed broken, the assessment kept hitting. That distinguishes an expensive remedy from a useless one.
Where a date is unknown, the interval is blank rather than zero. A missing first-demand date would otherwise drag every median downward. Most cases in the catalogue currently lack a verified demand date, so the headline duration figure we publish is the one that needs no estimate: time a still-open case has been running, measured to today.
Of the cases verified so far, 5 remain open, with a median of 9.4 years elapsed and the longest at 12.
COST
Where the dollar figures come from — and where they don’t.
Court records do not publish what litigation cost. Anyone claiming otherwise at scale is estimating. We separate the two kinds of number and never average across them.
DISCLOSED
3
Stated in the decision itself — a fee award, a sanction, an entered judgment, restitution, or a settlement whose amount was published. These are facts.
MODELED
0
Estimated from docket activity against published rate ranges. Always shown as a range, never a point value, and always labelled. No modeled figure has been published yet, because the model’s hours-per-motion assumptions have not been calibrated against a real fee award.
Where a figure exists, we also convert it per unit, because that is how an owner experiences it. An association does not have money of its own: it has common charges. Which produces the fact that took a court to say out loud — an owner suing their board is, through those charges, helping fund the defence against their own claim.
SOURCES
Where the records come from.
- Published decisions — New York Official Reports and CourtListener. Every holding on this site was read in full from the opinion, not from a summary or a headnote.
- NYSCEF — filing dates, case status, assigned judge, motion sequences and case type, read from the live docket.
- Statutes — the New York Senate Open Legislation API, fetched section by section rather than quoted from memory.
- Comparator states — the statute text itself. 2 of 14 comparator jurisdictions have been verified at primary source so far; the rest are withheld from display until they are.
A case does not appear on this site until a person has read the decision. Rows awaiting that reading are held in the database and are structurally excluded from publication — the site reads a view that cannot return them.
One consequence worth stating: New York does not classify these cases. NYSCEF has no condominium or cooperative case type, and neither does WebCivil. The governance disputes catalogued here are docketed as “Commercial (General)” and “Commercial – Contract.” The state cannot report how many of these cases it hears, because at the moment of filing it records them as commercial contract disputes. Any filing count we publish is our own analysis of e-filing records and is a floor, never an official statistic.
LIMITS
What this catalogue cannot tell you.
- It is a sample, not the universe. Our analysis of NYSCEF e-filing records suggests roughly 5,300 filings a year name a condominium or cooperative entity. This catalogue holds 22 verified cases. Nothing here supports a claim about how common anything is.
- Published decisions are a biased sample. Cases that settle quietly, get abandoned, or are decided without a written opinion are invisible. The record skews toward disputes that went the distance — which means it skews toward the expensive ones.
- Boards mostly win, and we publish that. The business judgment rule means courts defer to board decisions taken in good faith and within authority. Across every case verified so far, not one is a clean finding of liability against a board. We report it because it is true, and because it is the stronger argument: the courthouse does not discipline boards. It bills everyone for five to twelve years while the question goes unanswered. That is a case for an administrative remedy, not a case against any particular board.
- Docket entry counts are floors. The NYSCEF document list paginates at 75 rows. Any case at that number has more, and we record none rather than publish a page limit as a count.
- Duration is measured differently for open and closed cases. Open cases are measured to today. Closed cases are measured to their final order. The two are never averaged together.
Found an error?
Corrections are published, not quietly patched. If a holding is mischaracterised, a date is wrong, or a case has moved since we read it, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.