The NC Court of Appeals again stressed the importance of compliance with appellate rules. On October 4, 2014 in Henderson v. Garcia Motorrad, et.al. (Stroud, J., unpublished), the North Carolina Court of Appeals dismissed an entire appeal due to a procedural compliance issue. The Court dismissed plaintiff's appeal as interlocutory because plaintiff neglected to assert in his brief that delayed appeal would impair a substantial interest. Even though the order from which plaintiff appealed was a motion to dismiss, and perhaps appeared on its face to be a "final judgment," since the dismissal order did not address the claims raised in the third-party complaint, it was deemed to be interlocutory such that plaintiff was required to take that extra step or risk a dismissal. This case is another example of a recent trend in which the Court shows strict intolerance of procedural slip-ups.
Update provided by Tara Muller, Teague Campbell Dennis & Gorham, LLP
