Securing court jurisdiction to enforce your settlement
When future performance is contemplated, how do you make sure the court will keep jurisdiction to enforce the settlement?
Where an agreement states that it may be enforced under Code of Civil Procedure section 664.6, the court may retain jurisdiction and, in the event of a breach, enforce the agreement by entering it as a judgment. However, as the court in Mesa RHF Partners, L.P. v. City of Los Angeles (2019) 33 Cal.App.5th 913 makes clear, the statute includes certain requirements you must follow if you want the court to retain jurisdiction.
• You must retain the court’s jurisdiction before dismissal. In Sayta v. Chu (2017) 17 Cal.App.5th 960, the parties resolved their dispute in a confidential settlement agreement and dismissed their litigation in June 2015. (Id. at p. 963.) When one of the parties breached the agreement, in April 2016 the non-breaching party filed a motion to enforce the agreement under section 664.6. (Ibid.) On appeal from the trial court’s ruling on the motion, the Court of Appeal noted that although the settlement expressly provided that the parties would ask the trial court to retain jurisdiction to enforce the settlement under section 664.6, neither party did so. (Id. at pp. 964-965.) As a result, “‘the court lost subject matter jurisdiction when the parties filed a voluntary dismissal of the entire cause. Since subject matter jurisdiction cannot be conferred by consent, waiver, or estoppel, the court cannot ‘retain’ jurisdiction it has lost.’” (Sayta, supra, at p. 966, citing Viejo Bancorp, Inc. v. Wood (1989) 217 Cal.App.3d 200, 206-207.)
• You must follow the statute. In Mesa, the parties agreed in their settlements that the “Court shall retain jurisdiction pursuant to Code of Civil Procedure section 664.6 to enforce the terms of the Settlement Agreement.” (Id. at pp. 915-916.) In 2012, plaintiffs’ counsel filed requests for dismissal and inserted in the dismissals that the “Court shall retain jurisdiction to enforce settlement per C.C.P. § 664.6.” (Id. at p. 916.) The clerk entered the dismissals “as requested.” (Ibid.)
When the plaintiffs tried to enforce the settlements under section 664.6 by filing motions years later, in 2018, the Court of Appeal found that the trial court lost jurisdiction to enforce the settlements because the parties did not sign the requests for continuing jurisdiction, as required by section 664.6. Where parties strictly comply with section 664.6, the court can retain jurisdiction to enforce a settlement, even after an action has been dismissed. (See Wackeen v. Malis (2002) 97 Cal.App.4th 429, 439 [“We construe the second sentence of section 664.6 to mean, and we so hold, that even though a settlement may call for a case to be dismissed, or the plaintiff may dismiss the suit of its own accord, the court may nevertheless retain jurisdiction to enforce the terms of the settlement, until such time as all of its terms have been performed by the parties, if the parties have requested this specific retention of jurisdiction.”].)
So what are your options? The Mesa court offered two ways that parties could invoke section 664.6: (i) where the settlement agreement is not confidential, file a stipulation and proposed order attaching a copy of the settlement agreement (which presumably is signed by the parties), requesting that the trial court retain jurisdiction under section 664.6; or (ii) where the settlement agreement is confidential (or you would rather not file it publicly), file a stipulation and proposed order signed by the parties noting the settlement, requesting that the trial court retain jurisdiction under section 664.6. (Id. at p. 918.) Another option might simply be to have all of the parties sign the Request for Dismissal form, requesting that the trial court retain jurisdiction under section 664.6.
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