Sometimes when you win a case, your problems are just beginning, not coming to a close. One way that can happen is if you get a judgment to collect money from someone who either doesn’t have it (and may even declare bankrupcty) or who is able to hide their cash and other assets, forcing you either to drop it or come after them in another expensive round of such cases.
There are lawyers who know how to track money down, if it exists, but many lawyers don’t have much or any experience with this: If you get in this situation, make sure you’ve got the right kind of lawyer because your current lawyer may make things even worse, at a substantial cost. Indeed, if collection of any judgment was going to be hard or impossible, this is something your lawyer should have checked out and warned you about before you wasted time and money chasing a dry well, as they say.
Sometimes efforts to hide assets to pay a judgment can raise questions about how the loser was able to pay his or her own lawyer. Whatever assets the defendant may have had may have gone to the lawyer, and provide a paper trail to more assets for the winner. Lawyers typically try to claim that information about their fees is secret or privileged, though proper analysis suggests it is not — some lawyers will do almost anything to protect their financial interests.
Here’s an extreme example from Florida where two lawyers are trying to escape trouble arising from the mysterious payment of their seven figure legal fees by two clients who claimed poverty when they lost a multimillion dollar judgment to the estate of a woman killed by their car — which one defendant drove. These are two members of the Miccosukee Tribe, a wealthy operator of a Florida casino which has been ducking efforts to collect their multi-million dollar judgment. Apparently the defendants claim to have no money to pay, and claim they had no other money before except their annual payment from the Tribe.
Though the clients claim they had no money and sometimes claim they never did pay, the lawyers apparently swore that they were paid by their clients, or maybe it was through loans to the clients made by the Tribe, or whatever.
… Bert’s [the client's recent] testimony, … reversed his own earlier account and appears to undermine the lawyers’ position that they were paid the high fees by their clients — not the Miccosukee Tribe.
Lewis, a former U.S. attorney, and Tein, also an ex-federal prosecutor, are facing potential perjury sanctions for allegedly lying about who paid them. The lawyers maintain the tribe advanced money or made loans to Bert and his daughter, Tammy Gwen Billie, so the defendants could pay their legal bills.
The source of the legal payments [not meaning legitimate legal, just payments for lawyer fees] to the lawyers carries significant weight. If the funds came from the tribe as opposed to the father and daughter, it means there indeed was more than enough money available to pay an outstanding civil judgment of nearly $3.2 million. The pair has refused to pay, insisting they cannot afford it.
Billie, who served time in prison as a result of the car-crash case, has failed to show up for a deposition and to turn over key documents to the attorney for the victim’s family. …
The victim’s attorney, Ramon M. Rodriguez, is still trying to obtain important evidence from Lewis and Tein, including their retainer agreement with their Miccosukee clients.
In his deposition, Bert said he signed the retainer agreement with their law firm, but it was not translated for him. Lewis and Tein said they cannot find the 2005 contract.
Bert also testified that he was unaware that Lewis and Tein collected about $950,000 in legal fees after a Miami-Dade jury returned a verdict against him and his daughter in July 2009 — money that could have gone toward paying the judgment….
Bert’s testimony comes more than three years after he and his daughter were ordered by a Miami-Dade jury to pay the financial award to the survivors of a woman who was killed in a head-on collision more than a decade ago….
Both Bert and his daughter have insisted they have no money of their own to pay the award. Each collects $160,000 a year — like hundreds of other Miccosukees — from the tribe’s profitable gambling operation at the west Miami-Dade casino.
The perjury allegations surfaced last year after the Bermudez family’s lawyer, Rodriguez, accused both attorneys and their clients of lying when they asserted the Miccosukee Tribe did not foot their huge legal bill. Rodriguez had obtained 61 checks totaling $3.1 million — made out by the tribe to the Lewis Tein law firm — to back up his allegations….
Apparently the defendants didn’t have auto insurance. No telling where their $320K per year from the Tribe was going, but I’m guessing that’s protected by Florida’s ample laws shielding certain assets. (Remember when OJ Simpson “moved” to Florida around the time he was sued by the estates of his two victims — Florida has very generous protections for the legally beset who want to protect their money but are too cheap to go offshore.)
Things aren’t looking good for the plaintiffs unless a judge is prepared to take some serious steps to discourage defendants and the lawyers from going in circles like this. And the reputed legal fees paid by the defendants — regardless who really paid them — are amazingly high for defending a traffic accident case.
Before you spend lots of money on a lawyer and expenses to chase someone down, you should give careful consideration to whether you can collect the money if you win. That’s one of those common sense questions lawyers normally don’t learn in law school.
Local Story: Miccosukee Indian disputes lawyers’ account about source of legal payments in fatal car-crash case
