WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Legal Newsline) – A trial court shouldn’t have listened to a former judge who testified plaintiffs lawyers deserved up to $1,500 per hour in a tobacco case.
Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal made that ruling on March 2 in the long-running case of James Naugle, who sued Philip Morris over the death of his sister Lucinda. The first verdict, reached more than a decade ago, called for $300 million in damages.
In 2012, the Fourth District ruled that was too much. A new trial on damages produced an $11 million decision. Naugle’s lawyers, from Link & Rockenbach of West Palm Beach and Kelley Uustal of Fort Lauderdale, then motioned for attorneys fees and costs.
Naugle’s fee expert, retired circuit court judge Thomas Lynch, testified to the “extraordinary” time and labor it took to pursue the case, which made its way to the Fourth District five separate times. Broward County Circuit Court Judge Jack Tuter took these arguments, as well as Philip Morris’ fight against them, into consideration when he awarded $5.3 million to attorneys, plus $1.8 million in prejudgment interest.
On appeal, Philip Morris argued Judge Tuter was wrong to listen to the fee expert Lynch who, Philip Morris alleged, failed to explain why the lawyers’ work should be considered “extraordinary” under factors set forth in a 1985 decision, Florida Patient’s Compensation Fund v. Rowe.
When asked how the time and labor involved impacted his opinion, he said: “I didn’t analyze it in that fashion. I didn’t say, okay, a lot of novelty, a lot of difficulty, let’s jump [the rate] to $50 an hour. I didn’t do that . . . I reviewed everything, everything, and made a determination as to whether or not those rates were reasonable, and I found them to be reasonable even though my initial impression when I saw the numbers, I thought [the rates were] high.”
At trial, Lynch claimed he considered Rowe factors as to the total fee but not the hourly rates that would be charged to arrive at it. In accepting his testimony, Judge Tuter said Lynch was offering “pure opinion testimony based on a lifetime of experience.”
The Fourth District says in its ruling that experience alone does not make an expert.
“Here, the expert ‘provide(d) no insight into what principles or methods were used to reach his opinion,” Judge Jeffrey Kuntz wrote. “With no insight into the principles, and with clear errors in methodology, the court had little to assess.”
The case will head back to the trial court for new proceedings on attorneys fees and costs.