A state appellate court has allowed a New York-based gym company to vacate a default judgment against it after its lawyers failed to appear at a motion-based oral argument, knocking back a trial-level judge’s default decision that came after the lawyers apparently never saw an oral argument date posting on the state Unified Court System’s eCourts website.

The default issue at hand, and the Appellate Division, First Department panel’s reversal of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Nancy Bannon’s 2019 decision on it, focuses on whether Rosenberg, Giger and Perala, the attorneys for a company in a loan repayment-based case, had a “reasonable excuse” for missing a Dec. 5, 2018, oral argument that had been scheduled and noticed by Bannon, according to the panel’s decision and court documents, including the opposing briefs on the defendant’s motion to vacate Bannon’s Dec. 6, 2018-entered default judgment.