Kaye Scholer Will Pay Opponent’s Legal Fees After Judge Blasts Pleading
Kaye Scholer has agreed to pay an opponent’s legal fees after a Florida bankruptcy judge criticized the law firm for trying to “score a litigation point” in its pleadings.
The law firm represents Bank of America in a foreclosure action against a Miami condominium developer, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports. In a motion that sought to keep developer Cabi Downtown from renting out the condo units, Bank of America contended that at least nine condos had been rented to convicted felons, including a sexual offender.
Cabi’s lawyers responded that only two of the units were rented to residents with criminal records, and their histories don’t raise any basis for concern, the story says. Both sides now agree that none of the renters was a sexual offender.
Judge Laurel Myerson Isicoff said the Kaye Scholer lawyers should have investigated more thoroughly before putting possibly defamatory allegations in its pleadings, according to the Wall Street Journal account. “If you truly believed there were dangerous individuals living in that building,” Isicoff wrote, “then that is something you should have brought to the debtor’s attention immediately, unless it’s more important to score a litigation point than it is to protect the safety of the people living in your collateral.”
A Kaye Scholer lawyer told the Wall Street Journal that the information in the pleadings came from lease files provided by the developer, but some of it turned out to be inaccurate. A lawyer for Cabi countered that the assertion is “completely wrong.”
