Underwood Towers Ltd. Partnership

The substitute plaintiff sought to foreclose a commercial mortgage on certain real property of the defendant U Co., which had leased the property from the defendant city of Hartford to construct an apartment complex. After U Co. failed to make payments on the loan, it executed two more mortgages, each of which was secured by a separate note. When the notes and mortgages were thereafter sold to the substitute plaintiff, it was provided with an affidavit in which the seller averred that one of the original notes had been lost. U Co. and its management agent, the defendant C Co., claimed that the substitute plaintiff lacked standing to foreclose the mortgage because it could not produce the lost note and, thus, that the trial court lacked subject matter jurisdiction. The trial court determined that, pursuant to New England Savings Bank v. Bedford Realty Corp. (238 Conn. 745), the substitute plaintiff's failure to produce the lost note did not deprive it of standing to foreclose the mortgage. The court thereafter rendered judgment of strict foreclosure. On appeal to this court, U Co. and C Co. claimed, inter alia, that the trial court erred in concluding that the plaintiff had standing to foreclose the mortgage, and the city claimed that, in making that determination, the trial court improperly relied on New England Savings Bank, which, the city contended, had been overruled sub silentio or improperly decided. Held that the judgment of the trial court was affirmed, and because that court aptly addressed the arguments raised by U Co. and C Co., this court adopted the trial court's thorough and well reasoned decision as a proper statement of the facts and applicable law on the issues; moreover, the city's unpreserved claim that the trial court improp- erly relied on New England Savings Bank or, in the alternative, that that case was wrongly decided, was unavailing, as this court declined to presume that our Supreme Court intended to overrule its long-standing precedent in