You may, as has been suggested before, make a complaint about the attorney with the Florida Bar, which is the body responsible for licensing, regulating, and disciplining lawyers. That doesn't get you any money, but if the Bar finds he violated the rules of professional practice it can punish him for it, up to disbarment from the practice of law.
If a plaintiff's claim is frivolous, you bring a motion in that case for the court to dismiss it for that reason and ask for any money sanctions then if you had to needlessly expend money because of the frivolous filing. The fact that the court dismissed it on summary judgment rather than because it was frivolous indicates the plaintiff's case, as stated in the pleadings, was not frivolous. The plaintiff lost because the judge determined that after reading the complaint and viewing all the all the available evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiff it is clear to the judge that the plaintiff didn't have enough to prevail as a matter of law. That's different than the case being frivolous.
When the lawyer misstates the law, you tell the judge that, though in general the judge is going to find out about that anyway when the judge verifies what he/she was told by the parties/attorneys involved with the case.
Just because the plaintiff had prior injuries doesn't mean he's blocked from suing over new injuries sustained as a result of someone's negligence. It makes the case harder for the plaintiff to win because the plaintiff has to show that there were new injuries or that old injuries were aggravated as a result of the alleged negligence. It is not, however, impossible to do. With the right evidence it is possible to show that there are new injuries distinct from the old ones.
As far as dragging in people for depositions that you think aren't necessary for the case, the law allows pretty wide berth for the parties to discover relevant evidence favorable to their case. That can include things other than just eye witnesses accounts of the incident in dispute. Taking a deposition of a CEO of a small company is unlike taking a deposition of a CEO of a multi-billion dollar world wide enterprise with many thousands of employees. The former is much more likely to know everything that goes on in the business he or she runs than the latter. If you felt that the person being desposed could not possibly have knowlege of anything relevant to the case, you could have brought a motion with the court to object to that deposition. The person being deposed could have done that too.
Sometimes the lawyer will have a reason to think that the person has something relevant to provide and upon taking the deposition finds out there's not much useful from the testimony. That doesn't mean the lawyer violated any rule in taking the deposition. Lawyers in discovery and investigation of the case are going to look at anything they can think of to pursue that might be helpful to their case. Not everything they pursue yields something useful. But so long as the lawyer has a good faith belief that something relevant to the case may be uncovered the lawyer is not violating the rules.
If you want to see if there is any basis for suing the plaintiff's attorney consult a civil litigation attorney. But it may be that while the attorney's actions were aggressive in pursuing the case there wasn't any negligence or any intentional tort committed by the lawyer. So go into this with the understanding that while you feel strongly about what the attorney did, there may not be anything for you to sue the lawyer and win money damages. It sucks to get pulled into a lawsuit that ultimately fails. Spending time and money defending yourself is not fun. But our legal system allows a plaintiff to sue if he's got some basis for the suit, even if it ultimately turns out he/she doesn't have what it takes to win. Plaintiffs and their lawyers aren't punished by the law merely for bringing a case that turns out to be a loser.
To give you a little background. Slip and falls use to be a treasure trove for personal injuries attorneys in Florida so much so that the law was changed around the 2013 area to address these and put a stop to the frivolous lawsuits.
A plaintiff could not longer just claim they got hurt in a slip and fall and get a payday but they NOW had to provide the defendant knew about a very serious danger and was reliance in not fixing it.
This attorney acted like this 2013 law did not exist and was acting like it was the late 90's and 2000 where this kind of thing was ramped.
The client was not wearing proper shoes and fell in some water from the rain. If the attorney used the 2013 change in the law, there is no way a lawsuit should have been brought.
What about hiding the prior injuries by misquoting HIPPA law? How is that not a violation of lawyer ethics? When he quoted the HIPPA law, he literally stopped right before it said that we could get this information for these types of lawsuits. I know lawyers have gotten in trouble when they used CHAT GPT to write a lawsuit and its misquoting law and cases. How about the coverup of car accident and medical records by intentionally misquoting HIPPA law?
I think I found that normally 10 depositions are allowed for a lawsuit unless you have special permission. I think I counted like 15 deposition this guy did and it was also dragging the CEO of what I could consider a decent sized company with many properties in the millions across the country over a property that he had only visited a single time years prior so he could be asked about what he knows about rain and water being slippery and if trees have leaves that fall on the ground in the wind and things of this nature.
Look, its one thing if you are taking depositions and getting more and more information each time and sort of narrowing down the new information you are finding. This attorney wasted everyone time for years and never got anything from anyone.
He completely ignored the
Florida Revised Statutes 768.0755
He completely and intentionally misquoted the
HIPPA law to cutout the part of the law that said we can get those records for this type of case.
He dispositioned more people then you are allowed to. Rule 30(a)(2)(A)(i) limits the number of depositions to 10 “by the plaintiffs, or by the defendants, or by the third-party defendants.”
He dispositioned people with no knowledge of the event and even some people who did not even remember the property.
The Florida revised statute said that WE had to be aware of the problem. We are the owner( not some random person)
Once he was aware that we had no knowledge of this, then we should have been out of the lawsuit not dragged in for years. This was done for the sole reason of harassment using the legal process as a weapon.
Judge seem to give them every benefit of every doubt all along the way and dragged this out for years but in the end the summary said we were right on every point in the law and they had no case. I am told that its very rare for a judge to grant legal fees in any circumstance unless they are really upset with one side. I think if he was directly called out on what he did and made to defend himself, it might have been a different story.
Let me ask you, do you think a complaint to the bar may have they research and uncover information that could later be used for a frivolous lawsuit case against the attorney or is this like the internal affairs for cops who always aways find the cop innocent no matter how good or bad the evidence is? Thanks.
