There are many times when the community needs to initiate legal actions against an owner or a supplier or a third party.

Historically, our courts have understood that the president was empowered to file a lawsuit on behalf of the community without the need for this having been agreed in a previous meeting of owners.

In this way, there was no need to wait for the celebration of an AGM or EGM being the president able, without further delay, to raise the demand in defense of the community.

Currently, the situation is different and the president cannot file a lawsuit on behalf of the community without having previously adopted the agreement in the owners’ meeting.

In this way, if a president, without having an agreement from the AGM or EGM that empowers him to do so, files, for example, a lawsuit against a defaulter, an annoying neighbor, an owner who has carried out illegal works, this claim would be dismissed for lack of prior agreement, without any need for the judge to go into the merits of the matter.

This is especially important since sometimes by not wanting to wait for the ordinary meeting to be held or to call an extraordinary meeting, the mistake is made of initiating legal actions without this prior agreement of the meeting, which ends up causing a loss of time throughout the development of a procedure that will end up failing for lack of this requirement with the consequent cost for the community.

You might think that the authorization can be granted in general to the president to file the demands that he considers convenient and thus avoid waiting for a meeting every time it is necessary to initiate legal actions.

Unfortunately this formula is not usually accepted by our courts, causing the loss of time and money mentioned above. For this reason, it is necessary to be very aware of the risk in which we could incur and it would be quite advisable to call for an extraordinary meeting when the ordinary meeting of the community is not expected very soon. Urgency is not usually a good adviser.