construction litigation

When the editors and reporters at the Daily Business Review are seeking sage legal wisdom on major construction lawsuits involving high-profile projects for their readers, they turn to the firm’s Stuart Sobel for his input. Stuart, who is board certified in construction law by The Florida Bar, was quoted extensively by the DBR on his insights and takeaways on a lawsuit involving the “Signature Bridge” currently under construction in downtown Miami.

The article from the Daily Business Review, South Florida’s exclusive business daily and official court newspaper, appeared in yesterday’s edition of the newspaper under the headline “In Miami Federal Lawsuit, Litigant Seeks $155 Million for ‘Signature’ Construction Gone Wrong.” It focuses on a lawsuit in Miami federal court seeking the nine-figure damages due to the defendants’ alleged gross negligence in designing the new span that has been called Miami’s “Signature Bridge” (see renderings in video below). The article reads:

. . . Stuart Sobel, a shareholder at Siegfried Rivera in Coral Gables, is not involved in the lawsuit that Alexandre Drummond, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Atlanta, filed on behalf of Archer Western LLC and De Moya Corp., identified in the complaint as CJV. Sobel said it is suspect that one of the defendants, HDR Engineering Inc., would err so completely in its preliminary design documents, such as by failing to complete basic due diligence in not having wind tunnel testing done until after the project broke ground.

“You can do wind tunnel testing; you can do all sorts of testing, especially with the technologies that we now have,” Sobel said. “You can test the design 16 different ways from Sunday before you submit it. This is shocking to me if that’s true.” . . .

The firm’s Nicholas D. Siegfried authored an article that appeared as a “Board of Contributors” guest column in today’s edition of the Daily Business Review, South Florida’s exclusive business daily and official court newspaper. The article, which is titled “Contractor’s Fraudulent Lien Doesn’t Mean Owner Automatically Wins,” focuses on the surprising results of a recent ruling by the Fourth District Court of Appeal involving a contractor’s lien that the lower court found to be fraudulent. His article reads:

For those in the construction industry, the right to impose a lien against the improved property in the event of nonpayment is an effective tool to get paid. Chapter 713, Florida Statutes, as well as countless cases require lienors to prepare their liens accurately and to include only lienable items. The failure to properly prepare a claim of lien can result in a claim for punitive damages and exposure to attorney fees and costs.

However, based upon a Fourth District Court of Appeal case, not all is lost if a contractor’s lien is discharged as fraudulent. In fact, despite a contractor’s fraudulent lien, a contractor can still be deemed the prevailing party in an action against an owner and avoid a claim for attorney’s fees.

In Scott Newman v. Sony Construction et al., the homeowner retained the general contractor to build an addition to his home. When the owner failed to pay, the contractor ceased work, recorded a claim of lien for approximately $134,000 and later recorded a partial release of lien reducing the lien to about $100,000.

The contractor filed suit against the owner for foreclosure of the construction lien, breach of contract and quantum meruit (payments due that are not enforceable under contract). The owner filed a counterclaim against the contractor for fraudulent lien and breach of contract, and the parties subsequently agreed to a bifurcated proceeding whereby the trial court would first determine whether the claim of lien was fraudulent prior to a trial on the remaining issues.

The trial court found that many of the charges included in the lien amount by the contractor were not lienable. These included a charge for approximately $15,000 for supervision and an additional $22,200 for the contractor’s 20 percent profit margin. The trial court found that these charges, which represented a large percentage of the lien, were not supported by the contract between the parties and therefore were not lienable items. It also found other charges included in the lien for pool cleaning chemicals and services, hand tools purchased for use at the job site but not left on the premises after completion, air-conditioning warranty work and rental equipment abandoned by the contractor at the job site were “not lienable by any stretch of the imagination.”

Articles Tagged with construction litigation

Stuart Sobel Provides Expert Insight on Major Construction Lawsuit Over Miami’s “Signature Bridge” in Daily Business Review

Article by Nicholas Siegfried in Today’s Daily Business Review: “Contractor’s Fraudulent Lien Doesn’t Mean Owner Automatically Wins”