ALBANY — Deutsche Bank cannot revive a residential foreclosure lawsuit that it abandoned for more than six years, a New York state appellate court ruled Thursday. The decision leaves Sullivan County homeowners David A. Leis and Marie Leis free of the dormant legal action after the lender blew court-mandated filing deadlines, ignored judicial warning notices, and failed to produce a single sworn statement explaining its prolonged silence.
The dismissal stands. Writing for the Appellate Division's Third Department, a panel of state Supreme Court justices upheld an April 2025 lower court order that threw out the bank's belated motion to vacate. The judges refused to excuse the lender's protracted delay, ruling that financial institutions cannot resurrect abandoned proceedings without showing a legitimate justification for sitting on their hands.
The dispute stems from an alleged loan default by David Leis on a residential promissory note secured by a mortgage signed by both spouses on their Sullivan County property. In March 2017, the trial court ordered Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas to file a formal application in the foreclosure action by December 31 of that year. The court issued an explicit warning alongside the timetable—miss the cutoff, and the case would be struck from the active calendar; fail to restore it within twelve months, and the matter faced outright dismissal.
The bank blew the deadline. When the court issued a follow-up notice in January 2018 striking the action from the docket, the lender took no corrective action. For twelve months, Deutsche Bank filed no motions, sought no extensions, and contacted no court clerks. The trial court dismissed the foreclosure action without prejudice on January 7, 2019.
Then came six years of silence. Deutsche Bank did not return to the courthouse until February 2025, when its attorneys suddenly asked the bench to cancel the dismissal and restore the foreclosure proceeding to the active docket.
Before the appellate panel, Deutsche Bank leaned on past precedents where clerical mistakes and administrative law-office failures spared litigants from procedural default. The judges swept the argument aside. The bank produced no affidavit from its attorney, paralegals, or any representative with direct knowledge of the case to substantiate a calendaring error, lost file, or internal communication breakdown.
The panel pushed back just as firmly against the bank's technical claim that the Leis family had never served a formal notice of entry for the 2019 dismissal order. While a notice of entry governs statutory deadlines to appeal, the court stressed that the procedural omission did not excuse the lender's wholesale refusal to comply with judicial mandates or justify years of total dormancy. Because Deutsche Bank offered no credible explanation for its six-year absence, the justices held that lower courts had no obligation to review whether the underlying foreclosure claim had merit.
The appellate ruling exhausts Deutsche Bank's bid to reopen the abandoned docket, cementing the dismissal of the 2017 foreclosure action.