New Jersey’s two-year statute of limitations is very strict, requiring a plaintiff to file their personal injury suit within two years of the date of the accident or injury or suffer a permanent bar to sue anyone for their injuries. New Jersey’s fictitious party rule (“John Doe” Rule), U. 4:26-4, provides a safe haven to a plaintiff “if the defendant’s true name is unknown to the plaintiff” after the statute of limitations has expired if they identify a John Doe as a placeholder for a to-be-identified defendant. This rule allows a plaintiff who timely files their complaint to amend their complaint to name the previously unknown, true defendant, after which the amended pleading will “relate back” to the original pleading and, thus, avoid the bar of the statute of limitations.
In Perez v. Rental Shop Holdings, LLC, 2025 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 1938 (App. Div. Oct. 15, 2025), plaintiff Leonidas Perez attempted this tactic. After falling down a flight of stairs in her apartment building in Newark, Ms. Perez went to an attorney with all of the critical information of her injury: the facts of her fall, the correct address of her apartment building, and the identity of her landlord, defendant Rental Shop Holdings. Three days before the two-year statute of limitations expired, her attorney filed a personal injury complaint identifying only the State of New Jersey and a fictitious “John Doe” as defendants. Two weeks later, realizing he entered an incorrect address for the building and the State as an incorrect defendant, her attorney filed an amended complaint under the “John Doe” Rule. He admitted that, despite having the correct information, he simply erred in naming the wrong defendant.
After service of the amended complaint, Rental Shop filed a motion to dismiss Ms. Perez’s complaint for violating the statute of limitations. The trial court denied the motion, ruling that because the attorney acted so quickly in filing the amended complaint, his conduct showed both due diligence and the lack of any prejudice to Rental Shop, two factors courts use to support the Rule’s application.
Upon appeal, the Appellate Division strongly disagreed, emphasizing the primary requirement in using the “John Doe” Rule is that that the plaintiff not know or have any reason to know the John Doe defendant’s identity. It discounted plaintiff’s due diligence claims because, despite quickly correcting the error, she and her attorney had two years to confirm the proper defendant, and her failure to do this “basic and easy investigation,” and name them in the timely filed initial complaint, was a simple lack of diligence.
This case sticks out from more traditional John Doe cases because courts will commonly grant, and affirm, the use of fictitious party practices, often opting to see cases resolve on their merits rather than more technical disqualifications. Yet, the starkness of the attorney’s error in failing to identify Rental Shop as the proper defendant in the complaint filed before the expiration of the statute of limitations, despite his client’s clear communication of that fact to him, and his candid admission of the mistake, likely made this determination by the Appellate Division quite simple.
