Kim

We reluctantly return in this case to the question of default judgments with a cautionary tale—well, three actually. The first is a tale for plaintiff’s attorneys, who may assume a defendant’s default is an unalloyed gift: an opportunity to obtain a big judgment with no significant effort. It is not. Instead, when a defendant fails to timely respond to the complaint, the first thing plaintiff’s counsel should do (after offering an extension of time to respond) 1 is review the complaint with care, to ascertain whether it supports the specific judgment the client seeks. If not, a motion to *272 amend is in order. In this case, counsel for plaintiff Gil Kim failed to do that. Instead, he simply asked the court to enter defendants’ defaults on the complaint as initially alleged. Unfortunately for Kim, the factual allegations of that complaint do not support any judgment in his favor.

And even when the allegations of a complaint do support the judgment a plaintiff seeks, he is not automatically entitled to entry of that judgment by the court, simply because the defendant defaulted. Instead, it is incumbent upon the plaintiff to prove up his damages, with actual evidence. It…