Condo Media - May 2013 - 50

FEAturE

Do Community Association Boards Have to Consult Their Attorney on Everything?

C

ondominium board members
often cringe at the thought of
the hourly fees they pay the association’s attorney. Association
attorneys cringe equally at the prospect
that boards won’t obtain the legal
advice they need, suggesting this question: When is legal advice essential and
when is it an unnecessary expense? We
consulted an association manager and
an attorney, expecting them to provide
very different perspectives. But we
found that they agree on two points:
1) It is possible to identify some issues
that don’t require an attorney’s input;
and 2) that list is very short.
Robert Kravets, CMCA,
PCAM, president,
Realty Corporation of
Massachusetts, Inc.
As condominium
governance has become more complex
over time, Kravets says, attorneys have
become more “integral” to association
operations and “more essential” to
their success. The complexity he describes exists across the board, Kravets
says, in the explosion of federal, state,
and local laws affecting condominiums,
“one more onerous than another,” and

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Condo Media • May 2013

in the nature of the problems condominium boards confront.
While it has always been true that
“20 percent of the people cause 100
percent of the problems,” Kravets
notes, the people making up that 20
percent are harder to handle today,
because “they know their rights” and
are more likely to assert them by filing
suits. “They force everyone’s hand,”
Kravets says. Even when he is confident
that he knows how to respond to an
issue, or how to advise the board to
respond, the litigation threat hovering in the background “makes me gun
shy,” and leads him to advise the board
more often than not to consult their
attorney.
Kravets cites several areas in which he
thinks foregoing legal advice would be
possible, but ill-advised.
• Lien Enforcement Actions. “We
[managers] all know how to write
the letters,” Kravets notes, “but if the
letter comes from me, I could start
a war. If you talk to the person, you
become a ‘debt collector’ [subject
to a federal law]. And if you don’t
talk to them, they hate you because
you’re not dealing with them personally.” It is better, in his view, to let

the association’s attorney handle the
lien enforcement process.
• Difficult residents. What do you do,
Kravets asks, when “an autistic kid
decides to run around the corridors
naked, or when his parents insist that
he can find his way home, but he
can’t, and knocks on the wrong door,
freaking out the owners?” And what
about the mentally challenged adult
child, who decides to cook something and almost starts a fire while
her mother is at work? “And when
you go inside,” Kravets says, “you
discover that the place smells and the
kid really isn’t capable of taking care
of herself. I don’t want to be the one
to write that letter.”
These examples aren’t outliers,
Kravets says. They are typical of the
problems community association
boards confront regularly. And the risk
is no longer “stepping into a hole and
twisting an ankle” if the board takes a
legal misstep, he says. “It’s falling into
quicksand and drowning.”
Experienced managers “have run
into a zillion things,” Kravets says,
and have probably seen most of these
problems, if not all of them, before.
Condo Media - May 2013

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