Commercial Yellowstone Injunctions

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Yellowstone Injunctions

You are a business owner and tenant, renting an office or a store or a loft. Your landlord just served you with a notice of lease default or notice to cure alleging that you have breached your lease and giving you between 5 days and 10 days to cure the default. If you fail to cure the alleged lease default, your lease will be terminated and eviction proceedings will be commenced. What do you do?

Don’t panic and instead give Mr. Wachtel a call to discuss your issue. He has a remedy to avoid forfeiture of your lease. Under the landmark case entitled First Nat. Stores Inc. v. Yellowstone Shopping Center, 21 NY2d 630 (1968), Mr. Wachtel will move for a preliminary injunction tolling the cure period until the dispute over the alleged lease default can be resolved by the parties or by the court.

Tolling the cure period (putting the landlord’s pursuit of your eviction on hold) is of paramount importance for two reasons. First, a court will only grant an injunction before the cure period expires. Once the cure period expires and the landlord has terminated your lease, the court will refrain from granting the injunction. Second, if in fact you are in default and you have breached your lease, you will probably need more than 5 to 10 days to remedy the default. Curing the default may be as easy as obtaining sufficient insurance or it maybe as time consuming as clearing up a violation issued by the NYC Fire Department. Whatever the alleged default is, getting more time to cure it will be essential.

Even further, you may even dispute that you are in default of your lease and want a court determination before your lease is terminated.

A Yellowstone injunction is a New York Supreme Court proceeding initiated by the tenant when the landlord seeks to terminate the lease because of what the landlord perceives as a default thereof. For example, the landlord may allege that a tenant is doing something in violation of the lease and serve the tenant with a notice to cure. The tenant doesn’t want to give the landlord the opportunity to prematurely terminate the lease, so the tenant may go to New York Supreme Court and seek a Yellowstone injunction and temporary restraining order.

A Yellowstone injunction is a kind of injunction that asks the court to maintain the status quo. Under the Yellowstone injunction, the landlord would not be permitted to terminate the lease and gives the tenant the right to cure the alleged default without the notice to cure expiring. Without the Yellowstone injunction, the notice to cure would expire before the judge could determine whether the tenant was in default or not in default, and the landlord could terminate the lease.

In this practice, Mr. Wachtel helps commercial tenants avoid lease forfeiture. He understands that significant amounts of money are at stake, life investments, family businesses, location driven ventures that make a tenant’s location of paramount importance.

Mr. Wachtel understands the need for the client to know what is going on every step of the way. Because of the personalized attention Mr. Wachtel gives each case, he knows exactly what stage the case is at and can inform the client with a telephone call.

From his office in midtown Manhattan, the law firm of Gary J. Wachtel, Esq. represents commercial tenants across the entire New York City area pursuing Yellowstone injunctions, including the boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island and throughout Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Contact his law offices now, or call him today to arrange for your initial appointment, and let his experience be your advantage – 212-371-6500.

To learn more about the cases Gary J. Wachtel has successfully handled for clients, please visit his Success Stories.