Your client wants to recover damages f
or breach of contract and demands that you assert as many causes of action as possible. In addition to the breach cause of action, you consider a declaratory judgment claim, right? Wrong! The Second Department has held time and time again that “[a] cause of action for a declaratory judgment is unnecessary and inappropriate when the plaintiff has an adequate, alternative remedy in another form of action, such as breach of contract” (see BGW v. Mount Kisco; Stuckey v Lutheran Care Found. Network, Inc.; and Alizio v Feldman).
Recently, the Second Department in Tiffany Tower Condominium, LLC, et al. v Insurance Company of the Greater New York reaffirmed this principle. There, Tiffany Tower Condominium, LLC (“Tiffany Tower”) sustained damage to its condominium during Superstorm Sandy. Insurance Company of the Greater New York (the “insurer”) paid Tiffany Tower’s original claim for the damage sustained to the condominium under Tiffany Tower’s insurance policy but when Tiffany Tower submitted a supplemental claim for the additional losses sustained to the condominium as a result of the storm, the insurer denied coverage. As a result, Tiffany Tower initiated a lawsuit seeking, among other things, to recover damages for breach of contract and for a judgment declaring that coverage for the supplemental claim was improperly denied. The insurer moved to dismiss Tiffany Tower’s second, third, and fourth causes of action for breach of breach of contract, judgment declaring that coverage was improperly denied, and violation of General Business Law § 349, respectively. Justice Ash denied the insurer’s motion to dismiss these causes of action and the insurer appealed.
In its recent decision, the Second Department held that the Supreme Court erred and should have dismissed Tiffany Tower’s cause of action for a declaratory judgment. The Court held that where plaintiff has an “an adequate, alternative remedy in another form of action,” i.e., the breach of contract claim, the declaratory judgment cause of action is thus “unnecessary and inappropriate.”
Interestingly, the First and Fourth Departments have also dismissed declaratory judgment causes of action where plaintiff had an “adequate, alternative remedy in another form of action, such as breach of contract.” (see Main Evaluations, Inc. v. State; Apple Records, Inc. v. Capital Records, Inc.) The Third Department, however, has had no similar holdings.