By Christopher Dahl
Guest Contributor

Maryland appellate court-watchers are likely aware of the progress made in the Appellate Court of Maryland over the last decade to process appeals timely. In Fiscal Year 2014, the ACM adopted aggressive Case Time Standards to decide 90 percent of its appeals within nine months of argument or submission on brief, and 100 percent within one year of the same. In at least the last two fiscal years, the ACM has reported exceeding its nine-month metric by three to five percent, and the ACM has come within inches of meeting the one-year metric.

Recognizing this, many of those same court-watchers may have been surprised on July 28, 2025 when the ACM issued Deborah Lavine et al. v. American Airlines, Inc. While Lavine was, on the surface, a relatively uncomplicated appeal from the grant of a summary judgment to the defendant, it took a long time to get there, having been appealed more than 15 years earlier in the 2009 September Term of the then-Court of Special Appeals:

Given the ACM’s attention to case-decision time, how could this have happened? After some investigation, the reason turns out to be an almost uncanny synchronicity between the intended date of the opinion and the 2011 bankruptcy of American Airlines.