A recent Law 360 story by Carolina Bolado, “Fla. Justices Udo Attys’ Fees Ruling Over Settlement Offer” reports that the Florida Supreme Court quashed a decision deeming a settlement offer too ambiguous to warrant an attorneys’ fee award, ruling that the lower court’s “nitpicking” of offers adds to judicial workload, which is contrary to the purpose of the law.

In a 4-3 decision, Florida’s highest court said two settlement offers from W. Riley Allen to Gabriel Nunez and his father, Jairo Nunez, in a dispute over a car crash were clear and unambiguous and said Allen was entitled to the $343,590 in attorneys’ fees and costs under Florida’s offer-of-judgment statute after he prevailed in his suit.  Under the law, if a plaintiff makes a settlement offer that isn’t accepted and then wins a judgment of at least 25 percent more than the offer, the plaintiff can recover reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.

In this case, Allen sent two separate identical $20,000 settlement offers to the two defendants that were rejected.  He then won a nearly $30,000 judgment and asked for an award of fees under the offer-of-judgment law.  The Fifth District Court of Appeal had ruled that one paragraph in the proposals for settlement were ambiguous because they did not make clear if $20,000 would resolve claims against just one or all of the defendants.

But the Supreme Court said the Fifth District had focused too much on one paragraph in the offers.  When read as a whole, the offers were not ambiguous, the Supreme Court said.  “If two codefendants each receive a proposal for settlement, in which they are specifically named, each codefendant should possess all the information necessary to determine whether to settle,” the high court said.  “In this context, it appears disingenuous to assert that there exists a legitimate question as to whether one codefendant’s acceptance could have settled the offeror’s claim against the other codefendant.”  The Fifth District “unnecessarily injected ambiguity into these proceedings and created more judicial labor, not less.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Barbara Pariente noted the proliferation of litigation around proposals to settle and urged courts to refrain from “nitpicking” when assessing whether an offer is reasonable.  The three more-conservative justices signed on to a dissent by Justice Ricky Polston, who said the court did not have jurisdiction to review the case because the Fifth District’s decision did not expressly and directly conflict with other appellate opinions on the issue.

The case is Allen v. Nunez et al., case number SC16-1164, in the Supreme Court of Florida.