A first-person reflection on K. Lee Builders, Inc. v. Barnes, No. COA25-1029 (N.C. Ct. App. July 1, 2026) — decided this month.

It was raining the day I drove out to Henderson.

I remember it because the rain was the whole point. September 16, 2024. I turned off the highway into Vance County, past the raw acreage and some shuttered storefronts, out to the house at the center of the case — the house our client had paid to have built, and the house he could not live in the way he had been promised. We went down into the basement. The walls were wet. You could see it and you could feel it: water finding its way through walls, the same walls that had been the flashpoint of this dispute since the winter of 2023. Standing in that basement, in the damp, it was easy to believe we had the better case.

Todd Jones and I prepared for weeks. Then we tried it — four days to a jury in Vance County Superior Court, the kind of trial where you learn the two-lane roads, the coffee shop near the courthouse, and the rhythm of a rural venue that is a long way from your office.

The jury found against our client on the contract claim. But the jury never heard about Plaintiff’s mechanic’s lien, and the verdict said nothing about whether the lien was valid or enforceable. The lien had been discharged from the property only because our client posted a cash bond in its place. And still, after the contract verdict, the trial court ordered the Clerk of Court to keep holding that bond. That was the part Todd and I could not square: if the verdict established only a contract debt, and not a valid lien, what was the bond still securing? And there was another problem. The lien dates were wrong, and they were not wrong in some obvious, self-correcting, scrivener’s-error way. They were just wrong.

The argument almost no one wants to make

Every construction lawyer knows the mechanic’s lien statute can be unforgiving about form. And every construction lawyer has also, at some point, watched a court wave off a technical defect in the name of substantial compliance. That is exactly the trouble: the case law seems to run both ways, and no one could tell you with confidence which way an incorrect furnishing date might cut. It might sink the lien. It might be forgiven as a harmless slip. I made the bet that it would sink. I stood up at the pretrial hearing and argued that the plaintiff’s claim of lien was fatally defective — not because of anything about the merits of the work, but because the lien recorded the wrong dates.

The claim of lien listed September 5, 2022, as the first furnishing of labor and August 25, 2023, as the last. But when I went back through the project records and the text messages between the parties, something jumped out: the dates were wrong. My argument was that this was not a harmless clerical slip. The dates of first and last furnishing are load-bearing: enforcement relates back to the first furnishing date, and the statutory clock for filing and enforcement runs from the last. Let contractors file false dates, and you let them manufacture priority and sidestep the deadlines the statute imposes — and no one searching the record would ever know.

The trial court granted our summary judgment motion in open court, ruling that the dates did not comply with the statute.

And then, the next morning, the judge took it back.

I will not pretend that moment was anything other than shocking. Having had time “to reflect on that and do further research,” the court reversed itself, called it “simply a wrong beginning and end date” and announced it would modify the dates to conform to the evidence — as a sanction — and treat the lien as discharged and the enforcement question as moot. We noted our objection for the record. Then we tried the case. Then we lost the verdict. Then we appealed.

On July 1, 2026, the Court of Appeals agreed with the argument I had made in that Vance County courtroom.

What the Court held

Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Arrowood held that a claim of lien containing incorrect furnishing dates is legally defective, and that the trial court erred in “modifying” those dates to save it. The reasoning tracks the argument, and it is worth walking through, because it reshapes the terrain for anyone who files or challenges liens in this state.

Start with what came before. Last year, in Fine Line Homes, LP v. Luthra, the Court held that a claim of lien that entirely omits the date of last furnishing is defective, rejecting the contractor’s plea that the statute’s “substantially as follows” language requires only substantial compliance. Fine Line Homes, LP v. Luthra, 298 N.C. App. 670, 915 S.E.2d 297 (2025). The date is required, the Court said, because it is the reference point for the 120-day filing window and the 180-day enforcement window. Id. But Fine Line Homes was about a missing date. It left open the question I was arguing: what happens when the date is there, but wrong?

K. Lee Builders, Inc. v. Barnes answers it. The Court held that an incorrect final furnishing date renders a lien defective “just as does an omitted date.” K. Lee Builders, Inc. v. Barnes, No. COA25-1029, slip op. at 9-10 (N.C. Ct. App. July 1, 2026). The logic is that a wrong date does the same damage as a missing one — it distorts the statutory deadlines — and because a claim of lien “cannot be amended,” the claimant is stuck with what it filed. That last point mattered because the trial court had tried to fix the dates. The Court of Appeals said you cannot; the lien stands or falls as recorded.

The scrivener’s-error escape hatch is real but narrow. I knew going in that the plaintiff would reach for Canady v. Creech, where the Supreme Court excused an obviously wrong first-furnishing date — one listed as falling after the lien was even filed, an impossibility that put any reader on notice of the mistake. Canady v. Creech, 288 N.C. 354, 218 S.E.2d 383 (1975). The Court preserved Canady but held it did not help here: our plaintiff’s error “was not an obvious scrivener’s error.” K. Lee Builders, slip op. at 10. Instead the Court applied Beach & Adams Builders, which binds a claimant to an incorrect date where nothing on its face reveals the error, and confines the Canady exception to errors that are “incongruous, obvious, self-apparent and easily reconcilable” on the record itself. Beach & Adams Builders, Inc. v. Nw. Bank, 28 N.C. App. 80, 84, 220 S.E.2d 414, 416 (1975). A plausible-looking wrong date — the kind a title examiner would have no reason to doubt — is exactly the kind the statute does not forgive.

Prejudice is beside the point. This was, for me, a very important paragraph in the opinion. The Court acknowledged that neither my client nor any third party was actually prejudiced by the wrong dates — and held it did not matter. K. Lee Builders, slip op. at 11. Substantial compliance is measured by whether the record gives notice to interested parties, or parties who may become interested — a forward-looking test about the integrity of the public record, not a backward-looking hunt for someone who was misled. The Court reached back more than a century to 1896 in Cameron v. Lumber Co. for the proposition that a lien must be recorded with enough certainty that no one who later becomes interested in the property “need misunderstand it.” Cameron v. Lumber Co., 118 N.C. 266, 268 (1896).

The bond

Here is where the case may have delivered its sharpest practical lesson.

Early in the litigation, our client had deposited a cash bond of $53,410.76 with the Clerk to discharge the lien and free his property. The plaintiff assumed — as many practitioners may — that winning the money at trial meant collecting from that bond. The Court of Appeals said no. Relying on George v. Hartford Acc. & Indem. Co., the panel held that a discharge bond “acts as a substitute for the land”: it secures the lien, not the contract claim. K. Lee Builders, slip op. at 12. And a claimant with no valid lien has nothing to enforce against the substitute. Because the plaintiff had “no valid claim of lien to enforce,” it was “unable to do so” against the bond. K. Lee Builders, slip op. at 12-13. The Court vacated the order holding those funds and directed their release. Id.

The plaintiff still holds a $53,410.76 judgment on the contract. But it must now collect that judgment the way any judgment creditor does — not by reaching into a bond that was posted, and released, to unburden the property.

What this means for practitioners

If you file liens: Treat the furnishing dates as the most dangerous lines on the form. After Fine Line Homes and now K. Lee Builders, Inc. v. Barnes, both an omitted date and an incorrect date are fatal — and you cannot amend your way out of the mistake. If you discover an error, your only real option is to cancel and re-file within the statutory period, if the period still allows it. Do not count on a court’s willingness to “modify” the dates to match the proof; that is precisely the move the Court of Appeals rejected here. And do not count on the scrivener’s-error exception unless the error is the rare kind that is obvious and self-correcting on the face of the record.

If you challenge liens: The incorrect-date defense is now squarely available, and it does not require you to prove your client was harmed. Pull the claim of lien early, check the dates against the actual project records, and if they are wrong and not obviously so, you have a summary-judgment argument that lives independently of the merits.

On bonds: Advise clients — on both sides — that a discharge bond rises and falls with the lien, not the underlying debt. For the owner, a bond posted to clear title can be recovered if the lien fails, even if the contractor prevails on the contract. For the contractor, a defective lien means the bond is not a payment source at all; you are left to enforce your judgment like anyone else.

A last word

Two closing notes — one practical, one professional.

The practical one: if a case ever takes you to Henderson, stop at Sadie’s Coffee Corner downtown. It fueled us through days of trial, and it is worth the drive on its own.

The professional one is the reason I wanted to write this at all. We tried the facts hard and lost the verdict — the jury saw the contract its own way, and I have no quarrel with that. But this didn’t turn on the facts. It turned on two dates on a form. The lien statute does not care how strong your evidence is or how many weeks you spent assembling it; it asks only whether you got the record right.

Check your dates. Then check them again.

July 2, 2026/by Construction