In California, a judgement lasts for ten years, but it can be renewed. The renewals are summary. You just file a form with the clerk before the ten years expires. Each renewal lasts another ten years. Here, 17 plaintiffs got a joint judgment in 1995. In 2005, their lawyer renewed it. But the lawyer died in 2008. When time came to renew the judgment again in 2015, one of the plaintiffs renewed it on behalf of all the others.
Now, some of the creditors are trying to collect. But the debtor argues that the 2015 renewal was void because the one plaintiff’s filing it for the others constituted the unauthorized practice of law. The trial court bought the argument, but the Court of Appeal disagrees.
Although there are cases where legal form filling has been considered the practice of law, in those cases, the defendants were a for-profit business that went beyond merely providing access to forms and giving clerical assistance in filling them out. See People v. Landlords Professional Services, Inc., 178 Cal. App. 3d 68 (1986). In contrast, filling out the form here didn’t take any particularized legal skill or knowledge. Indeed, the Plaintiff essentially copied the form the attorney had filed ten years earlier and updated the calculation of interest. Filing the form was purely ministerial. Nor did Plaintiff ever hold himself out as anyone’s attorney or offer anyone advice. Under the facts of the case, the Plaintiff was more of a scrivener than a lawyer. Indeed, in a similar case, a corporate officer’s filing a form to domesticate a sister state judgment was not found to have been acting as an attorney on the corporation’s behalf. Tom Thumb Glove Co. v. Han, 78 Cal. App. 3d 1 (1978).
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