From changing the summary judgment standard to determining when plaintiffs can haul corporate executives into the courtroom, Florida courts will be busy in 2021.
By Carolina Bolado, Law360 | January 3, 2020
After nearly a year of remote hearings, jury trial shutdowns and delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, litigators are bracing for an uptick in overall litigation in the coming year as the country emerges from the pandemic and parties who may have opted to sit on their claims begin to come back to the courthouse.
“The key thing that I think litigators feel right now is, ‘when do we get to go again?'” Leslie Kroeger of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC said. “We’re just raring to go.”
Here are some key cases attorneys will be watching in the coming year:
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Suzuki Motor Corp. v. Winckler
Attorneys with multinational corporate clients are closely watching a suit against Suzuki Motor Corp. over allegedly faulty motorcycle brakes that might impact how much access plaintiffs suing companies will have to corporate executives.
Florida currently applies the apex doctrine — which makes it harder for opposing litigants to depose top company officials — to government officials like heads of state agencies, but it has not yet applied the doctrine to private company executives. But that could change in the Suzuki case, in which a plaintiff who was paralyzed in a motorcycle crash wants to depose the company’s chairman.
At oral arguments in December, Suzuki’s attorney Raoul Cantero of White & Case LLP told the justices that allowing the deposition of Suzuki Chairman Osamu Suzuki simply because of his knowledge of a couple of documents regarding the faulty brakes could open the door to regular depositions of top corporate officials in product liability litigation.
But Shea Moxon of Brannock Humphries & Berman, who argued for plaintiff Scott Winckler, said the doctrine is unnecessary and the current rules have been sufficient to prevent what it is supposed to guard against — the targeting of top executives to gain leverage, embarrass a company or harass an executive.
Don Hayden of Mark Migdal & Hayden said he expects the “heavily stacked pro-business Florida Supreme Court” to reverse the lower court’s ruling and apply the apex doctrine to shield senior executives from depositions that are often used merely as an additional lever to force settlement.
The case is Suzuki Motor Corp. v. Winckler, case number SC19-1998, in the Supreme Court of Florida.
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