Plaintiff wins a big medical malpractice verdict, more than $6 milliion, and then based upon this report from Julie Littky-Rubin everything went wrong.

"Marelia v. Yanchuck, et al., 32 Fla. L. Weekly D1966 (Fla. 2nd DCA August 15, 2007):

A woman sued the lawyers who represented her in a medical malpractice case involving her baby son. The case was settled for 6.75 million dollars. The mother wanted to buy two annuities, but wanted to be sure that the annuities would provide a monthly benefit payment for the child, in addition to a lump sum payment for her to use at her discretion once a year for three years. The documents did not explicitly so reflect.

The guardian ad litem asserted that the payments were for the benefit of the child and brought a declaratory judgment action. This had the effect of freezing the funds, and the mother was then later sued by someone who had purchased an expectancy in her share of the annuity.

The trial court determined there was no issue of fact as to whether the settlement documents in the order approving settlement be made for the benefit of the child because there was nothing in the settlement documents to that effect. The court reversed. It found it was error to rule that way because the plaintiff was contending that this was what she had wanted, and what she advised her attorneys to include, but it never made it into the documents, and that was the issue. One defendant argued that the attorney ad litem would never have approved the settlement if the money were to go to her anyway, and therefore she wasn’t damaged.

The court further found that the statute of limitations did not begin running on the plaintiff’s legal malpractice case (another basis for the summary judgment) until the Alachua County Circuit Court’s order determined that the order approving the settlement was null and void, and that the settlement documents failed to disclose the parties’ intent regarding the payments. The attorneys argued that the action was barred by the statute of limitations because the debt collection judgment filed against her over the expectancy should have put her on notice. The court disagreed.