Lis pendens
A lis pendens — literally a pending suit — is a notice recorded against real property announcing that litigation affecting its title is under way. Anyone who buys the property, or lends against it, after that notice is filed takes subject to whatever the court eventually decides.
What Minn. Stat. 557.02 actually says#
Any party to an action in which title to, an interest in, or a lien upon real property is involved, affected, or brought into question may file a notice of the pendency of that action with the county recorder in each county where the land lies. The notice carries the names of the parties, the object of the action, and a description of the property.
Then the operative sentence: from the time of filing, and from such time only, the pendency of the action is notice to purchasers and encumbrancers.
Those four words do the work. Before filing, a buyer who knew nothing of the lawsuit takes free of it. After filing, nobody can claim not to have known. The notice is recorded in the same manner as a mortgage and can be discharged by an acknowledged writing.
What it is not#
It is not a lien. It secures no debt and it can be filed by a party who is owed nothing. It does not freeze title, and it does not prevent a closing.
What it does is make the property commercially untouchable. Title insurers will not insure over a pending claim to the title they are being asked to insure, so the practical effect of a lis pendens is that financing evaporates and buyers walk. That gap — legally weak, commercially devastating — is why the instrument gets abused, and why courts have a discharge mechanism.
The three time limits#
Ninety days. A lis pendens filed at the time the complaint is filed, before the action has commenced, has no force against the property unless the summons is served within 90 days of that filing. A notice can be recorded against a property by someone who then never properly starts the case.
Two years. Any party claiming title or an interest may apply to the district court for an order discharging the lis pendens where the action has not been brought on for trial within two years of the filing. On filing a certified copy of that order with the county recorder, the notice becomes void.
Ten years. Under Minn. Stat. 557.021 a lis pendens stops being notice — actual or constructive — once it has been of record for ten years, unless a new notice in the same action is filed within that period.
Where it shows up in distressed property#
Quiet title actions, mechanic's lien foreclosures, partition suits among heirs, marriage dissolutions, and foreclosures by action under Minn. Stat. ch. 581.
On tangled-title and heirs' property in particular, a lis pendens is often the first public sign that a family dispute over an inherited house has become litigation — which is also the point at which the property stops being sellable and starts deteriorating.
Recorder or registrar#
On Torrens property the notice belongs with the registrar of titles, filed as a memorial on the certificate. A lis pendens that never becomes a memorial on registered land may not bind a later purchaser at all, which turns a filing technicality into a lost claim.