A Chicago personal injury lawyer has filed a class action lawsuit against the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, asserting the sheriff has used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse for refusing to serve court summons to people being sued, yet has refused to refund hundreds of dollars in service fees paid per lawsuit.
The law firm of Robert Langendorf P.C. filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court, asking the court to order Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart to refund all fees Dart’s office collected to serve summons on those being sued, yet retained even after allegedly refusing to serve the summons.
According to the complaint, Langendorf used the Cook County courts’ E-file portal to file a lawsuit in Cook County court against Walmart on behalf of a client. As part of that filing, Langendorf said he paid $245 in fees, supposedly required by the sheriff’s office as payment for serving the court summons on four defendants named in the action.
However, Langendorf said he later discovered the sheriff’s office never attempted to serve the summons “due to COVID-19 Emergency Essential Civil Process Procedures.”
Langendorf said the sheriff’s refusal to serve the summons resulted in those summons being considered legally invalid, as Illinois court rules prohibit summons from being served more than 30 days after they are issued.
Langendorf said he then needed to hire a private service to deliver the summons, costing an additional $240.
He said the sheriff’s office has refused to refund the fees his firm paid the office for summons that were never served.
Langendorf is seeking to expand the action to include a class of potentially hundreds of others who have paid service fees to the sheriff’s office for lawsuits filed since March 2020, yet never received the summons service the fees were expected to pay for.
The lawsuit accuses the Cook County Sheriff’s Office of violating a contract, and wrongly retaining the funds, as the plaintiffs assert the sheriff’s office “has no legal authority or discretion to retain … fees for the service summons, after failing to serve (the) summonses…”
Langendorf is represented in the action by attorneys Larry D. Drury and Thomas Rebholz, of Larry D. Drury Ltd., of Chicago.