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  • The Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal recently issued a unanimous ruling affirming the summary judgment entered in favor of our Defendant law firm clients. The Plaintiffs, former clients of the law firm, brought suit alleging legal malpractice, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty, among other claims, upon allegations that the law firm was negligent in its representation of the Plaintiffs, causing them to lose pay on death benefits of over $30 million dollars. The Plaintiffs argued that the law firm, while seeking to recover sums allegedly due under a death benefit policy, failed to argue the delayed discovery doctrine with respect to Plaintiffs’ fraud claims, which were dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. Plaintiffs maintained that if the law firm had argued the delayed discovery doctrine, the argument would have saved their fraud claims from dismissal.
    • Our firm’s lawyers successfully established that the delayed discovery doctrine was in fact raised by the law firm, and even if it was not raised, the delayed discovery argument would have been futile as all of the Plaintiffs’ claims were barred by the statute of limitations as a matter of laws as Plaintiffs were charged with notice of any fraud at the time they entered into the death benefit policy, the terms of which may have conflicted with the verbal representations of the issuer. It was at the time the policy was executed that the statute of limitations began to run and not when the Plaintiffs became aware of the loss of their pay on death benefits years later. As the suit to recover benefits was filed more than four years after execution of the policy, Plaintiffs’ claims for fraud were barred as any fraud should have been known at the time of execution. Thus, as the statute of limitations expired before filing suit and prior to the law firm’s retention, the firm could not have committed legal malpractice as Plaintiffs had no valid cause of action to begin with. The trial court therefore granted the firm’s motion for summary judgment and ruled that Plaintiffs’ claim failed as a matter of law. On appeal, the Fourth District agreed with the trial court’s conclusions and unanimously affirmed the trial court’s ruling. W. Todd Boyd, Esq. and Craig J. Shankman, Esq. represented the Defendant law firm in this action.