Art. 4657.Failure of Defendant to Answer Timely

A concursus proceeding is meant to resolve a dispute among every interested claimant at once, and a claimant who never answers threatens to leave that resolution incomplete. Article 4657 gives the other parties a tool to force the issue: when a defendant misses the ordinary answer delay, any party, not only the plaintiff, may move for an ex parte order shortening the time left to respond.

Once that motion is granted, the court orders every defendant who has not yet answered to file an answer within a further delay the court sets, capped at ten days from the service or publication of the order. How that order reaches the delinquent defendants depends on their number: if five or fewer have failed to answer, each gets a copy of the order served on them individually; if more than five are behind, the order runs instead as a single published notice in the parish where the proceeding was filed.

A defendant who still lets the extended deadline pass faces a real consequence. Article 4657 precludes that defendant from filing an answer afterward, and from pursuing a claim against the plaintiff at all. This is the concursus proceeding's substitute for a default judgment, one that Article 4656 dispenses with: instead of a judgment being taken against the silent claimant, that claimant loses standing to press its own claim to the fund or property, while the case moves forward among the claimants who did respond.