Hello,
If anybody has experience and can be of help here, it would be greatly appreciated. My roommate and I are about to take my ex-landlord to small claims court to get our security deposit back. We have taken advantage of the great free legal counseling in the city and are ready to go - but we have a couple of important questions that we are unable to find a straight answer to -
1) Can we sue our landlord as two plaintiffs under the same civil case/suit? We've begun the process of filing the suit with both NCourt and TurboCourt, and in both cases we've only been able to list one plaintiff. It would be more money and time to file separately, and it seems from what I've read that roommates should file a joint claim in NY State - but how?
2) My ex-landlord has three different names he's done shady business by in NYC - the name on our lease and the name the property deed is under (what we believe to be his legal name) being two of them. When filing the claim, how should the AKA be done? Should each name be listed as a separate defendant? If it is done this way, is there a way to make it clear that we are suing one person with three different aliases rather than 3 separate people?
Thank you for any help - we've had a heck of a time finding out the correct way to do this, and don't want to make any missteps that could delay the return of our deposit.