Legal Question in Civil Litigation in Florida

I do not understand why you cannot bring the lawsuit on your own, unless you are a corporation. If you offer an attorney an hourly fee and costs and or cost and a 40% portion of the fee, I am sure you can find someone, unless the potential defendant is uncollectable. You cannot split the cause of action. Try a consumer lawyer in your area. Want to know the law? Sign up for our free newsletter on varies areas of the law by sending an email to [email protected] and requesting the newsletter, or go to www.ConsumerLawyerHelp.com.

As a practical matter, you can opt to go the small claims route and file for the $5,000 in damages. However, the law requires you to bring all claims "arising out of the same transaction or occurrence" in the same suit. Thus, there is no practical way to parse out your claim and an attempt to do this would result in consolidation of the two cases and removal to the court of approriate jurisdiction, which would be the County Court.

So it seems there are two options: 1) Shoot for the 5k on the premises that something is better than nothing; or 2) Hire an attorney. If 2, you should be able to find someone to send a demand letter for around $400.00 or so, and if there's assets in the nursery or fee provisions in the contract (meaning the attorney could potentially recover fees from the nursery), a retainer of $2,000 to $2,500 would probobly be sufficient and carry the possiblity that you would get your fees reimbursed when recovery was made. One final option would be to consider a contingency agreement whereby the attorney gets paid only if they recover money for you. You probably couldn't get the full amount under this scenario, but could get as much as 7k or so, which is 2 more than the 5k available in small claims.

IN what area are you looking for a lawyer?

Scott Behren

You must sue the defendant where he resides or does business. The issue is, is any judgment collectable. Does the defendant have assets?

You can bring the suit on your own, unless you are suing as a corporation. Because the amount owed is from the same transaction, you probably cannot break it down for small claims. I am not sure what area of Florida this is in, but please feel free to contact me for a free telephone consultation. Regards,