A pro se plaintiff who brought a malpractice action against his former Manhattan employment lawyer failed to show a reasonable excuse for defaulting on that lawyer’s motion to dismiss where he relied on his “optimistic belief that the court would grant his eleventh hour request for an extension of time” to file opposition papers, an appeals court has ruled.

An Appellate Division, First Department panel has also found that the lower court’s denial of plaintiff Bijan Karimian’s request for a time extension was proper because Karimian’s “proffered excuse” for waiting until the last minute to request the extension—that he thought the opposition-papers deadline had been indefinitely postponed pending his motion to seal the court file—was “belied by the record.”