Large Attorney’s Fee Recovery for Russell Dohan

Big Settlement For A Local Miami Personal Injury Lawyer

Board Certified Attorney Russell Dohan’s experience and Board Certification status paid off in a big way recently in recovering attorneys fees in a Miami-Dade Court, with the Judge awarding him $600 per hour, for a total fee due of almost $200,000.

Normally the rule is that each party pays their own attorney.  In a personal injury case, we take a percentage of the award to our Client.  However, there is a law in Florida that forces a Defendant to pay fees when the Plaintiff makes an offer to settle the case and the offer is not accepted by the Defendant.  If the Plaintiff obtains a verdict at trial of 25% more than the final settlement demand, the Plaintiff’s lawyer receive fees from the Defendant.

In this case, such a result was had and in a big way.   Our client suffered a simple sprain.  We made a final settlement offer of $7,000, which the Defendant’s insurance company refused to pay.  At trial, we recovered $11,000.  Imagine the shock the Defendant and his insurance company had when the Court awarded $200,000 in attorneys fees on top of the $11,000 Verdict.  To make matters worse, the Defendant was an individual who only had $100,000 in insurance coverage.  Of course, the Defendant looked to his insurance company to pay the entire award, since their failure to pay the simple $7,000 in the first place led to this problem for him.  State Farm, the Defendant’s insurance company, ended up paying the entire award.  A case that could have and should have been settled for $7,000, ended up costing an insurance company well more than $200,000.  Here at Goldberg & Dohan, no matter how big a case is or how insignificant a case may seem to others, we fight them all with everything we’ve got, and sometimes, that fight is well rewarded.