![]() ![]() ![]() However, each District Court carries its own set of filing requirements for an Unlawful Detainer action. Parties are permitted to appeal adverse rulings within 10 days, and the court will allow a brand-new trial in Circuit Court on the merits.Īn Unlawful Detainer is filed on a short, universal form DC-421 that lays out basic information about the parties and the amount claimed. Thus, generally, the process is focused on whether or not there was an enforceable contract and whether or not rent was paid, and defense attorneys can have difficulty in throwing up procedural roadblocks to proceeding to judgment. A civil General District Court proceeding on Unlawful Detainer will progress in five short steps – the plaintiff will file the action, the parties will attend an initial hearing to set trial (or obtain a default judgment), the plaintiff will file a bill of particulars, the defendant will file a grounds of defense, and the parties will argue before the judge at a short hearing. ![]() By contrast, Virginia District Court tends to be more plaintiff friendly in that it does not allow for discovery, subpoenaing witnesses, motions practice, or other pre-trial procedure and hearings. This is significant because a rent collections action in Virginia Circuit Court (where civil cases seeking more than $25,000 are otherwise filed) is a much more extensive process, requiring pleadings, discovery, motions, and potentially a jury trial. However, by filing an Unlawful Detainer action, a party may exceed this jurisdictional authority and file for any amount of past due rent or other contract-based damages (include future rent under an accelerated rent clause) as part of the proceeding. The other interesting twist to it is that an Unlawful Detainer action is filed in Virginia’s General District Court, which typically has a jurisdictional limit of $25,000. An Unlawful Detainer action is strange because it combines both proceedings – an action at law to recover rent owed under the lease agreement and an action at equity to recover possession of the premises. Virginia permits a landlord (either commercial or residential) to pursue eviction and past due rent in a single combined action filed in General District Court, known as an “Unlawful Detainer.” To understand the odd nature of an Unlawful Detainer action, understand that Virginia’s legal history, as with the United States’s legal history generally, emerged out of the British legal distinction between courts of law (which awarded money to parties who were wronged) and courts of equity (which required parties to take some action to remedy the wrong instead). Virginia has some of the most landlord-friendly eviction proceedings available in the nation. ![]()
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