ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) - A personal injury lawyer who abruptly quit her firm, taking her email and Dropbox passwords with her, is liable for her former employer’s legal fees although she won’t have to pay any damages, a Georgia appeals court ruled.
The Cotto Law Group sued Vanessa Benevidez in 2019 after she and a paralegal quit the firm, leaving Cotto without access to her electronically stored files, her firm email account and a fax line. Cotto accused Benevidez of stealing client files and causing the firm to incur thousands of dollars in expenses and lost business as other employees were forced to reorganize Benevidez’s paper files.
Cotto’s marketing director said she spent more than 100 hours on the files, neglecting her other work that typically brought in 20 to 35 new cases a month. Name partner Isaac Cotto testified five of the firm’s personal injury clients left “within 24 hours” and those cases were typically worth “from $2,000 to $10,000.” He said he asked Benevidez for the Dropbox password but she never gave it to him, forcing his staff to figure it out “through trial and error.”
The trial judge entered a default judgment against Benevidez after she failed to file an answer to the complaint. Benevidez participated in hearings over damages, however. After Cotto finished his testimony, the judge ordered a recess and then, before Benevidez began calling her own witnesses, the judge said Cotto failed to meet his burden of proof on damages.
Cotto never presented “a number for how much money the firm lost,” the trial judge said, and his evidence amounted to mere “speculation.” Two days after the hearing, the court entered its written order stating “the plaintiff failed to prove damages as required by law.”
Georgia’s Fourth Division Court of Appeals upheld the denial of damages, but reversed on the issue of attorney fees.
“Cotto offered no specific evidence about any of the five `stolen’ cases, and thus no basis for making any reasonable estimate of their potential value,” the appeals court said in a March 2 ruling, adding “It isn’t clear what the $2,000 to $10,00 range even represents.”
The firm would have paid the salaries of Quiroz and her assistant whether or not Benevidez quit, the court went on, and the trial court was justified in rejecting punitive damages based on the facts presented. Cotto testified Benevidez offered him the Dropbox and email passwords within days of quitting, the court said, undercutting any claim she acted “recklessly, wantonly, and with conscious disregard for the consequences” of her actions.
Attorney fees were a different matter, the court said. Georgia law allows the recovery of fees when a defendant loses a default judgment, and the trial court had no choice but to award something. The appeals court remanded the case to determine an appropriate amount to award the plaintiffs.