Dynamite dynamite dynamite. This is the lawyer James dynamite audio program. It is the absolute best audio content by New York Business Attorney in both transactional and litigation practice areas. And it is helpful for all industries. Now here’s today’s episode. One more thing. Before we get started, you can reach me online by visiting my website, the lawyer james.com. The lawyer james.com. The lawyer james.com. You can call me at (212) 500-1891. That’s the office (212) 500-1891 (212) 500-1891. You can contact me by email at James at the lawyer. james.com. James at the lawyer, james.com. james@thelawyerjames.com or by text message at (917) 783-3153. Text message (917) 783-3153 that’s (917) 783-3153.
Today, we’re going to be talking about part one of our anatomy of a lawsuit series, and it’s basically, you know, the, the, what you need to do to file a lawsuit. We’re going to introduce some of the terminologies and then we’re going to take you through in other parts, uh, what the anatomy of a lawsuit is. A lawsuit is a, a filing, uh, of a dispute in a court where one party claims that he, she, or it was harmed and that this harm was done by another party. And when I say party, it can be either a plaintiff or defendant wire for the party, and a party can, can be a person like an individual person, you know, John Smith, or it can be a company like ABC, inc, or ABC, LLC. It can also be a partnership, a limited partnership. It can also be an association.
Um, and when, uh, a party it’s what is called is an aggrieved and aggrieved party is the one that’s harmed. That is the plaintiff. And, uh, the, the, the, the party that does the harm, or is accused of having done or alleged to having done the harm is a defendant. So we have a plaintiff who initiated the action or the lawsuit, and we have a defendant who is the party that’s being sued. And so the plaintiff, the party who files the action and is seeking damages or some other form of leaf, and we have the defendant who is the party that’s being alleged to have caused harm. And, um, and that’s the, the party, that’s the defendant. I just want to focus on one thing real quick. Before we get into the lawsuit. I, I misspoke when I said accused. There’s a difference between, uh, civil, which is, uh, between private parties and criminal, which is where there’s a state involved, where the state policies and protects its citizens from crimes.
And when we talk about a defendant who is accused of something, that’s typically in criminal law here, we’re not talking about criminal law, we’re talking about business law or civil law. And just as another aside, when, when there’s a crime, uh, with someone’s being one of the defendants being accused of a crime that is called a criminal proceeding, and the plaintiff is always, always, always a governmental entity like the state or the federal government. That’s why you’ll see the state of New York Business Attorney or the state of, uh, Oklahoma or the state of California, where the people rather the people versus, you know, John Smith or, or the defendant that’s where by the plaintiff is the, the state or some other governmental, um, entity in the context of a crime. Now, getting back to the civil lawsuit that we’re talking about, and let’s narrow down and, and, and style this as a business dispute.
So there’s a business dispute, the most common or one of those common ones is breach contract. So that’ll be our sort of case study. It would be a breach of contract case. So the plaintiff provides goods to the defendant and the goods are fine, but the defendant doesn’t pay for the goods. And now we have a dispute. So the plaintiff then sues the defendant in a lawsuit. Now there’s a lot of issues to discuss here. I’m just going to go a very broad-brushed review with very, very broad strokes because we can talk about this. And I will be talking about this in more detail in other, in other episodes. So there’s different places where one can file an action where the plaintiff can file an action filing and a state court in New York Business Attorney. There are different levels of the state court. There’s a small claims court. There’s a certain which is up to $5,000 for disputes up to $5.
There’s the civil court, which is disputes up to $25,000. And then there are disputes that are over $25,000. And those are in the New York Business Attorney state Supreme court. And then there’s a division within the New York state Supreme court called the commercial division. And the commercial division, uh, handles at least in New York County, which includes Manhattan, which is Manhattan. It’s. Uh, the, the, the minimum threshold is, is $500,000. There are other commercial divisions in other counties, and there’s a chart that shows you, which, uh, which counties, which minimum requirements are in place for, for each of the counties. Now there’s also the federal court for the federal court to have jurisdiction over case. It has to meet certain requirements. We don’t need to get into those, uh, requirements in this, because I’m just doing an overall sort of summary, the anatomy of a, of a lawsuit. So we’ve got the plaintiff, we’ve got the defendant, uh, has the defendant case.
Plaintiff is the one who filed the action. All right. Now, how does a plaintiff start a lawsuit while there’s a document that they need to prepare that a plaintiff needs to prepare? And the document is called a complaint. Now, a complaint is a document that basically puts the defendant on notice that the plaintiff has and is asserting claims against the defendant. So the, the, the complaint, you know, in different jurisdictions, there are different requirements, but for the most part, including New York Business Attorney state and federal, uh, for the most part, again, there are always sort of exceptions in these little vignettes and these little strange idiosyncrasies that, you know, you need to be very, very diligent in your research or, or, uh, practicing the word in this area to kind of understand what is required for what type of plan. Anyway. So our study cases, a breach of contract case.
So we have, um, the complaint and the complaint, uh, is a sheet of paper. And as a caption at the top, as the precaution contains the plaintiff and the defendant, and then you leave a space for an index number, which is the case number, and that gets assigned later, once the case is filed, uh, the way that I do my complaints is I have a preliminary statement, which basically says what the case is about. And then we have a section on the jurisdiction, how the court has jurisdiction. You have a section on who the parties are. We have a section on background facts, and then we have a section on, uh, counts or claims. In this case, it’s a breach of contract claim for, uh, to assert a claim for breach contract. We have to allege elements in order to meet and claim elements. There are several of them from each contract.
First is you have to say that there was a contract between the plaintiff and defendant to that. Um, the plaintiff performed its obligations under contract three, that defendant did not perform its obligations under the contract. And for that, there are that the plaintiff sustained damages as a result of the defendant’s brief. And sometimes if you want to take it up a notch, you can say that there are no defenses to the, to the contract. So that’s a breach contract plan. And then you have that in the complaint, you filed the complaint of hearing with an attorney. The attorney files the complaint on the myself system. The nicest system is the New York Business Attorney state, um, an electronic filing system for the courts. And once it goes through the once, the, once it gets filed, you have a, um, you have a case number that’s assigned. It’s an index number.
That number is assigned by the clerk of the court. Once that happens, you then serve a, uh, you, you get a process server to serve the complaint on, uh, the defendant. Once the defendant is properly served the defendant, depending on how it’s served has, uh, 20 days, if it’s served in person to answer or otherwise respond to the complaint. And if it’s not served in person then, or in unit in New York state, it has, uh, 30 days typically, uh, the attorneys for plaintiffs and defendants, if they need more time to respond, they agree on it. You know, 99 times out of a hundred or 999 times out of a thousand, there are rare circumstances where, uh, the extensions aren’t granted and by the way, extensions are also called adjournments in legal speak. So if you hear the word adjournment, it just beans, uh, simply an extension. So this is basically, you know, part one of the anatomy of a lawsuit and it’s commencing a lawsuit. So we went over basically how to, how to commence a lawsuit and what the different parties are. And then, you know, the next step will be kind of what happens after a lawsuit is filed. And then we’ll dig deeper into the anatomy of a lawsuit.
You can reach me online by visiting my website, the lawyer, james.com, the lawyer james.com. The lawyer james.com. You can call me at (212) 500-1891. That’s the office (212) 500-1891 (212) 500-1891. You can contact me by email at James at the lawyer, james.com. James at the lawyer, james.com. James at the lawyer, james.com or by text message at (917) 783-3153. Text message (917) 783-3153 that’s (917) 783-3153.