On March 24, 2026, Justice Cohen of the New York County Commercial Division issued a decision in United States Fire Ins. Co. v. Palin, 2026 NY Slip Op. 31201(U), declining to dismiss an action in favor of a later-filed New Jersey action even though the New Jersey courts refused to dismiss the later-filed action, explaining:
CPLR 3211(a)(4) permits dismissal of a complaint where there is another action pending between the same parties for the same cause of action in a court of any state or the United States. Generally the court which has first taken jurisdiction is the one in which the matter should be determined and it is a violation of the rules of comity to interfere. However, the practice of determining priorities between pending actions on the basis of dates of filing is a general rule, not to be applied in a mechanical way, regardless of other considerations. In the interest of judicial economy, the question is which court should defer, as a matter of comity, to the other in order to avoid vexatious litigation and duplication of effort, with the attendant risk of divergent rulings on similar issues.
Here, the New York action was commenced in November 2023, more than a year before the Palin Parties filed the New Jersey action involving substantially the same parties and issues in February 2025. The parties have appeared in this Court, answered the Complaint, asserted counterclaims and cross-claims, and began discovery pursuant to this Court’s scheduling orders. Although the New Jersey court declined to dismiss the later-filed New Jersey action, perhaps interpreting this Court’s prior order as intending to defer substantively to New Jersey as the proper forum, that ruling does not alter the fact that the New York case was filed first and had already progressed in this Court before the New Jersey action was filed.
New York has meaningful connections to the coverage dispute based on the allegations in the Complaint: the policies are alleged to have been issued by New York-admitted insurers; United States Fire Insurance is alleged to have been headquartered in New York when the policies were issued; GNY is headquartered here; and the GNY policies at issue were placed through a New York broker to insureds who identified New York offices—facts that matter to the comity balance. While New Jersey’s interests are significant as well, the circumstances here simply do not permit this Court to abandon a case properly brought before it for resolution.
In these circumstances, the existence of a later-filed parallel action in New Jersey does not by itself warrant dismissing this first-filed New York action. The motion to dismiss under CPLR 3211(a)(4) is therefore denied.
(Internal citations omitted).