The Florida Supreme Court has suspended a Miami lawyer, Scott Dinin, for 18 months after he admitted to filing frivolous lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act and then splitting the fees with clients.
"To the extent that Scott Dinin isn't out there filing any more lawsuits, there will be fewer lawsuits," Minh N. Vu, a partner with the Washington law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, told the Florida Record.
Fee-splitting is “a breach of the rules of professional conduct – the most clear violation of the rules,” Vu said, who has worked on studies tracking ADA cases nationally.
Florida has the third highest number of ADA Title 2 filings in the U.S., although there has been a decline this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vu said.
"I think the pandemic slowed down the productivity of the plaintiff's bar a little bit," she said.
There were also many lawyers in New York who had been filing website accessibility lawsuits and are now turning their attention to Braille gift card lawsuits, Vu said.
“There’s still a huge number,” she said of Title 2 lawsuits.
She’s not sure Dinin's suspension will deter other lawyers from filing similar lawsuits in Florida.
“That attorney is not going to file more lawsuits but it doesn’t mean other attorneys won’t continue filing lawsuits,” she said. “It’s a like a game of Whac-A-Mole. When one lawyer gets suspended, another one will pop up.”
Dinin filed 26 lawsuits against South Florida gas stations for failing to have closed captioning on the television screens next to gas pumps, Law.com reported.
In his guilty plea, Dinin admitted splitting fees with the hearing-impaired man who was the plaintiff in those suits, the story stated.
A federal judge said Dinin and the plaintiff were attempting to "dishonestly line their pockets with attorney fees from hapless defendants under the sanctimonious guise of serving the interests of the disabled community,” according to Law.com