By Hal Lewis, Partner

Within the past few weeks, Fonvielle Lewis Foote & Messer settled three separate cases in which the recoveries for our clients totaled just under $6,000,000. The cases involved a bystander who was injured when struck by a parade float in Leon County, a contractor who was hit head on and killed by a tanker truck in Dade County, and an insurance salesman who was killed when a construction company flagman in Wakulla County waved another vehicle to turn in front of his motorcycle. As one might imagine, all three cases were defended vigorously, so the final outcomes were extremely satisfying for the families of our clients.

Of course, our firm settled dozens of other important cases during that time as well, but the three cases mentioned above are the most indicative of serious litigation situations where experience and expertise were crucial. Every case is only as good as the lawyer prosecuting it, and all law firms are not created equal. Less than 1 percent of all attorneys are board certified in civil trial law, and only those board certified attorneys can hold themselves out as “experts” in the field. We believe that board certification played a large role in our attorneys obtaining the results that they did in these cases, and we encourage anyone seeking representation as the result of an injury or accident to hire a firm such as ours, where a large portion of the attorneys are civil trial specialists.

It is also important to remember that Fonvielle Lewis Foote & Messer never asks our clients to pay for any of the costs associated with litigating their cases unless we are successful in helping them make the financial recovery they deserve. If at the end of a case the jury “gets it wrong” and fails to award our client any damages, then our firm suffers the entire expense of the loss and the client, who has obtained their “day in court” is no worse off financially than they would have been had they never hired a lawyer. We never think for a second how much we are spending on a case, because once we take a case, we are committed to spending every dollar that it takes to litigate that case to its fullest. This obviously doesn’t guarantee a win in every case, but it does guarantee that our client will know and appreciate the effort that we put into trial on their behalf.

While our newsletter articles have detailed the large number of successes we have had in court over the past
several years, there were a very small number of cases during that time where the juries “got it wrong” and
sided with the defendants. In those three cases alone, our firm spent over $350,000 on expert witnesses,
medical and liability exhibits, deposition testimony, accident reconstruction models, travel costs and everything else required to present our clients’ cases to the juries in the best light possible. So not only did our firm spend countless hours of work on those three cases for which we will never be compensated, but we also lost a great deal of money that we will never recoup.

What separates Fonvielle Lewis Foote & Messer from other firms,
however, is that we are not discouraged by these losses but, rather,
encouraged to keep fighting and keep doing whatever is necessary to
win back those losses on the next case. We know that spending money
on protracted litigation is a necessary cost of doing business the right
way, and we aren’t citing these figures to boast or brag, but to simply
inform the public that hiring the right law firm can make a big difference
in the final outcome of any case!