US
A Florida appellate court upheld the dismissal of more than 70 lawsuits against tobacco companies and refused to allow attorneys to amend the complaints because the clients had died before the cases were filed.
This came less than four months after a federal court slapped a US$9 million sanction on Jacksonville-based Farah & Farah and The Wilner Firm, as well as their principals, Charlie Farah and Norwood Wilner, “to account for the immense waste of judicial resources by maintaining over a thousand non-viable claims.” The firms had filed approximately 3,700 Engle progeny cases in Florida state and federal courts previously.
But, in the decision on February 8, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal upheld a lower-court decision to dismiss 73 of the cases because the clients were dead.
Judges Timothy Osterhaus, Clay Roberts, and M. Kemmerly Thomas found that a Duval County circuit judge was right to refuse to allow the lawyers to amend the complaints to substitute their dead clients’ estates or survivors, if any exist.
The judges also scolded the plaintiffs’ lawyers for failing to confirm the allegations made in the complaints. “But plaintiffs’ counsel didn’t verify their claims before filing them. Instead, they alleged patently false things, such as that the plaintiffs’ injuries and losses were ‘continuing [and would] be suffered into the future.’ Then, once the cases were filed, they let the cases sit on the court’s docket for almost eight years, still without checking with their ‘clients’ or their estates to verify the allegations and amend them if necessary,” wrote Judge Osterhaus. “Plaintiffs’ counsel ultimately left it to the court to flush out the truth about their supposed clients and their non-viable claims.”
In the October 18, 2017 ruling, slapping the US$9 million sanction on the law firms, the federal district judges blasted Wilner and Farah for a variety of wrongdoing including filing lawsuits on behalf of dead clients. “As it turns out, many of the plaintiffs never authorized Wilner and Farah to file a suit. Some had barely heard of them,” the federal judges wrote in the 148-page order.“
It was this obstructive, deceptive, and recalcitrant behavior that, in combination with the hundreds of frivolous complaints, compelled the court to initiate sanctions proceedings,” US District judges William Young, Timothy Corrigan, Marcia Morales Howard, and Roy Dalton Jr. wrote in the order.