Bar to study suspicion of court leak
The state Supreme Court has recommended the investigation involving a pending case.
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published July 20, 2005
TALLAHASSEE - The Florida Bar said Tuesday it will look into allegations that secret information was leaked while the state Supreme Court considered a sensitive case last month.
"We will investigate it," said Bar executive director John Harkness. He said the case would be referred to a Bar grievance committee.
Such an investigation by the Bar is highly unusual, Harkness said. "I can't remember it ever happening," he said.
The decision was in response to a recommendation by the court itself, which recently completed an extraordinary internal investigation to determine whether a court employee improperly leaked confidential information in a pending case.
The court's inspector general interviewed 48 employees but found no evidence of a leak. But court documents released Tuesday shed new light on a case that led to the most elaborate internal investigation of court security procedures in years.
The probe was triggered by a sequence of events that the court's spokesman, Craig Waters, called "suspicious."
The case involved a Miami warehouse worker, Rodrigo Aguilera, who sued his insurance carrier after he was severely injured on the job. He claimed the company refused his requests for emergency medical treatment. The company claimed immunity under a state workers' compensation law.
After the 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled in the insurance carrier's favor, Aguilera appealed to the high court. Justices heard arguments in November 2003.
The case was before the Supreme Court for 19 months. Last month, eight days before the court sided with Aguilera, the two sides reached a confidential settlement and asked the court to dismiss the case.
The court refused to dismiss the case and ruled 4-3 in the worker's favor.
In his report, made public Tuesday in response to a request by the St. Petersburg Times, Inspector General Ken Chambers wrote that court clerk Thomas Hall got a phone call on June 7, the day before the settlement was made public, from an unidentified attorney friend in South Florida.
The caller told Hall that the court decision was known, that the insurance carrier's law firm wanted to settle and that "the case was going to be, or had been settled, for "an obscene amount of money,' " the report said.
Chief Justice Barbara Pariente ordered an investigation the next day, the report said.
Chambers said "the most likely recipient" of inside information in the case was the insurance company's law firm, Rumberger Kirk & Caldwell.
He also cited several e-mails between Feb. 23 and June 10 between a Supreme Court judicial assistant and an employee of Rumberger Kirk & Caldwell who used to work as a law clerk at the Supreme Court.
"The judicial assistant said she has never discussed the Aguilera case with the ex-court employee," Chambers wrote.
Neither person was identified and the former employee was not interviewed. One reason the court recommended that the Bar investigate could be to question people not employed by the court but who could be subject to disciplinary action.
The insurance carrier's attorney, Joshua Lerner of Rumberger Kirk & Caldwell's Miami office, called the focus on the case "much ado about nothing."
"I've never received any unauthorized information from any court," said Lerner, who also described as "purely coincidental" the timing of the settlement.
Aguilera's attorney, Lauri Waldman Ross of Miami, said: "I think the court has a duty to investigate if it thinks its confidentiality has been breached. I've never received any confidential information."
In the spirit of what she called "full disclosure," Waldman Ross said she has known Hall, the court clerk, for 25 years, since their days together at the University of Miami law school. But she said she never discussed the case with him.
"Even being mentioned in connection with something like this makes me upset," Waldman Ross said.
Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com