Common sense suggests that when a lien has been bonded off, the owner of the real estate need no longer be a party to the lien claim lawsuit. The Rhode Island Supreme Court has followed the common sense route, dismissing the property owner from a subcontractor's lawsuit – over the sub's objection – after a lien bond was recorded.
The decision in National Refrigeration, Inc. v. Capital Properties, Inc. demonstrates the lengths to which parties will go to seek leverage in a lawsuit. After the lien claim became a lawsuit, a bond was substituted for the lien, per the RI law. The law provides that "the lien plaintiff shall amend the complaint, to include the surety as defendant." The sub who had filed the lien argued that "include" did not mean that the property owner could be dismissed, but only that the surety could be added.
The RI high court noted that the lien law "is less than a masterpiece in clarity." Quoting other decisions, the court said: "The plain meaning approach, however, is not the equivalent of myopic literalism, and it is entirely proper for us to look to the sense and meaning fairly deducible from the context . . . Therefore we must consider the entire statute as a whole; individual sections must be considered in the context of the entire statutory scheme, not as if each section were independent of all other sections." The owners were dismissed from the case, and it will proceed as it should with the bond serving as security for the original lien claim.
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