396
Opinion of the Court
There is one aspect of the Court of Appeals' analysis, however, with which we disagree. The Court of Appeals suggested that it would be inappropriate to penalize respondents for the omissions of their attorney, reasoning that "the ultimate responsibility of filing the . . . proof[s] of clai[m] rested with [respondents'] counsel." Ibid. The court also appeared to focus its analysis on whether respondents did all they reasonably could in policing the conduct of their attorney, rather than on whether their attorney, as respondents' agent, did all he reasonably could to comply with the court-ordered bar date. In this, the court erred.
In other contexts, we have held that clients must be held accountable for the acts and omissions of their attorneys. In Link v. Wabash R. Co., 370 U. S. 626 (1962), we held that a client may be made to suffer the consequence of dismissal of its lawsuit because of its attorney's failure to attend a scheduled pretrial conference. In so concluding, we found "no merit to the contention that dismissal of petitioner's claim because of his counsel's unexcused conduct imposes an unjust penalty on the client." Id., at 633. To the contrary, the Court wrote:
would bring needed clarity to the Rule's application and save judicial resources. See post, at 408. But narrowing the range of factors to be considered in making the "excusable neglect" determination will not eliminate disputes over how the remaining factors should be applied in any given case. For purposes of the present case at least, the dissent appears willing to draw a line between ordinary negligence and partial "indifference" to deadlines, see post, at 407, but parties with valuable interests at stake will no doubt find this distinction susceptible of litigation. The only reliable means of eliminating the "indeterminacy" the dissent finds so troubling would be to adopt a bright-line rule of the sort embraced by some Courts of Appeals, erecting a rigid barrier against late filings attributable in any degree to the movant's negligence. As we have suggested, however, such a construction is irreconcilable with our cases assigning a more flexible meaning to "excusable neglect." Faced with a choice between our own precedent and Black's Law Dictionary, we adhere to the former.
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