18th Street Property, LLC v. A-1 Citywide Towing & Recovery, Inc., 2015 IL App (1st) 142444-U examines the res judicata and collateral estoppel doctrines in a commercial lease dispute.
The plaintiff landlord obtained a possession order and judgment in late 2012 on a towing shop lease that expired March 31, 2013.
About six months after the possession order, the lessor sued to recover rental damages through the lease’s March 2013 end date. The defendant moved to dismiss on the basis of res judicata and collateral estoppel arguing that the landlord’s damage claim could have and should have been brought in the earlier eviction suit. The trial court agreed, dismissed the suit and the lessor plaintiff appealed.
Held: Reversed.
Q: Why?
A: Res judicata (claim preclusion) and collateral estoppel (issue preclusion) seek to foster finality and closure by requiring all claims to be brought in the same proceeding instead of filing scattered claims at different times.
Res judicata applies where there is a final judgment on the merits, the same parties are involved in the first and second case, and the same causes of action are involved in the cases.
Res judicata bars the (later) litigation of claims that could have brought in an earlier case while collateral estoppel prevents a party from relitigating an issue of law or fact that was actually decided in an earlier case. (¶¶ 20-21, 30)
In Illinois, a commercial landlord’s claim for past-due rent and for future rent on an abandoned lease are different claims under the res judicata test.
This is because the payment of future rent is not a present tenant obligation and a tenant’s breach of lease usually will not accelerate rent (i.e. require the tenant to immediately pay the remaining payments under the lease) unless the lease has a clear acceleration clause. Each month of unpaid rent gives rise to fresh claims for purposes of res judicata.
The landlord’s remedy where a tenant breaches a lease is to (a) sue for rents as they become due, (b) sue for several accrued monthly installments in one suit, or (c) sue for the entire amount at the end of the lease.
The commercial lease here gave the landlord a wide range of remedies for the tenant’s breach including acceleration of rental payments.
The tenant defendant argued that since the lessor failed to try to recover future rent payments in the earlier eviction case, it was barred from doing so in the second lawsuit. The landlord claimed the opposite: that its claims for damages accruing after the possession order were separate and not barred by res judicata or collateral estoppel.
The court held that res judicata did not bar the lessor’s post-possession order damage suit. It noted that while the lease contained an optional acceleration clause, it was one of many remedies the landlord had if the tenant breached. The lease did not require the landlord to accelerate rents upon the tenant’s breach.
The court also noted that the lease required the landlord to notify the tenant in writing if it (the landlord) was going to terminate the lease. Since terminating the lease was a prerequisite to acceleration, the Court needed more evidence as to whether the lessor terminated the lease. Without any termination proof, the trial court should not have dismissed the landlord’s suit.
Afterwords:
1/ If a lease does not contain an acceleration clause, a landlord can likely file a damages action after an earlier eviction case without risking a res judicata or collateral estoppel defense.
2/ If a lease contains mandatory acceleration language, the landlord likely must sue for all future damages coming due under the lease or else risk having its damages cut off on the possession order date.