Florida Supreme Court disbars Coral Gables insurance attorney
An ethics expert said the disbarment was a result of a "sheer number of violations that was too much" for the lawyer to overcome.
The Florida Supreme Court disbarred Scot Strems, the sole partner and owner of the Strems Law Firm, for his inadequate staffing and insufficient office procedures that resulted in client neglect, case dismissals, aggravated jurists, and costly sanctions on a near-weekly basis.
Benedict P. Kuehne, a partner at Kuehne Davis Law, was among the attorneys representing the respondent, Strems, whose rapidly growing law firm, at one point, had three litigation attorneys, “with each managing approximately 700 cases,” according to the order.
Kuehne said his client did not “intentionally or purposely” violate the rules regulating the Florida Bar, and dedicated his career to representing homeowners who pursued their “legitimate grievances against insurance companies that refused to pay for damages to their homes.”
“Scot intends to ask the Florida Supreme Court to reconsider the severity of the sanctions based on his long track record of doing the right thing under often difficult circumstances,” Kuehne added.
Andrew Berman, a partner at Young Berman Karpf & Karpf in Miami who is an expert in ethics law, said Strems’ case was one of a cautionary tale of an attorney who was more interested in signing up new cases than solving the matters of the law firm’s existing clients.
“Few of the violations would themselves result in disbarment, although there was a finding of misrepresentations made by Strems himself in court submissions,” said Berman, who is not involved in the matter. “But the sheer number of violations was too much for him to overcome.”
The Supreme Court opinion chronicles multiple failures between 2016 and 2018 in which the law firm’s attorneys willfully violated court deadlines and procedural rules that resulted in many clients having their cases dismissed.
Presiding judges, two of whom submitted affidavits describing frequent meetings on how to handle the matter, dismissed these cases pursuant to Kozel v. Ostendorf. Kozel established a set of factors a trial court must consider in determining whether dismissal with prejudice is warranted when an attorney has failed to meet deadlines and procedural requirements.
The Supreme Court ruled that Strems was aware of these Kozel dismissals and the accompanying weekly sanctions ranging from $5,000 to $15,000, yet his law firm continued to accept 20 to 50 new cases per week.
And Strems’ law firm, which at one point had filed the most storm damage lawsuits in Florida, filed frivolous cases resulting in sanctions because, as one judge said, the claim was “so devoid of merit on the face of the record that there was little to no prospect that it would succeed,” according to the order.
The justices also took issue with Strems’ representation of an 84-year-old woman who sustained damage to her home from a hurricane. Strems settled Margaret Nowak’s lawsuit without client approval and the Supreme Court ruled that he deceptively interpreted the commonly used fee arrangement in his best interests.
Now, the state Supreme Court has approved these findings of fact by the referee but disapproved the disciplinary repercussions the judge recommended, which was a two-year suspension and public reprimand for Strems’ gross mismanagement of his law firm and his failure to communicate with clients, respectively.
“When all the violations are considered together, the totality of Strems’ misconduct warrants disbarment, which would achieve the three purposes of attorney discipline,” the justices ruled, pursuant to the 2015 ruling in Bar v. Dupee.
According to Bar, the threefold purpose of attorney discipline is, first, to protect the public from unethical conduct without undue harshness toward the attorney; second, to punish misconduct while encouraging reformation and rehabilitation; and third, to deter other lawyers from engaging in similar misconduct.
And the justices ruled that the public needs to be protected from Strems, citing, first, his interpretation of the ambiguous Nowak fee arrangement; second, the need to discipline Strems for his misconduct, which continued into the disciplinary proceedings; and third, as a warning to bar members.
The Supreme Court added: “Disbarring Strems will place other lawyers on notice that this court will not tolerate similar misconduct.”
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