[T]hirteen years after he was paralyzed in a fall from a roof in South Hero, eight years after severe injuries in an automobile accident compounded his health problems, and three years after his death from complications of pneumonia, the legal wrangling over the case of Robert Parizo continues.
The dispute is between Liza Barron, who is Parizo’s daughter and the administrator of his estate, and Thomas Nuovo, a Colchester attorney and Parizo’s longtime lawyer, over the fee that Nuovo took for representing Parizo after the 2010 traffic accident. Parizo received a $1 million settlement from the accident, of which Nuovo took one-third, or $330,000.
Parizo said at the time that Nuovo had never made it clear that he was representing him in the accident case on a contingency basis. Nuovo had represented him before and had only ever charged his customary fee of $180 per hour.
In a letter to Nuovo in 2014, Owen Jenkins, the attorney representing Barron, said that, based on an estimate that Nuovo had spent 50 hours on the case, the “value of your services was no more than $10,000.”
The initial dispute, over Nuovo’s fee, ended up before a jury in the civil division of Chittenden Superior Court. Last October, the jury found Nuovo had violated the Consumer Protection Act and awarded Parizo’s estate $549,000, an amount that with interest has grown to more than $630,000.
Both sides have appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court. Nuovo maintains the verdict was improperly reached. Barron and her lawyer, Jenkins, say the award of attorney’s fees — to Jenkins in this case — was insufficient. According to a follow-up ruling in February, Judge Robert Mello approved $75,000 in attorney’s fees for Jenkins; he had requested $244,560.
Nuovo has acknowledged that he failed to meet the requirement in the state’s legal ethics rules that a lawyer planning to take a contingency fee — a percentage of the winnings in a case — instead of charging an hourly rate, must get a signed agreement to that effect from the client. “A contingent fee agreement shall be in writing signed by the client and shall state the method by which the fee is to be determined …” the rules say.
Nuovo reported himself to the Professional Responsibility Board for failing to obtain a signed agreement from Parizo. The board issued Nuovo a private reprimand.
Judge Mello, who presided over the trial, steered arguments away from whether there had been an agreement in writing. The question for the jury, he said at the time, was whether there was any agreement at all. Finding for Parizo’s estate, the jury determined there was not.
The jury did rule in favor of Nuovo and his law firm, Bauer, Gravel and Farnham, on one claim by the Parizo estate that Nuovo had been professionally negligent in failing to file suit against one of the two drivers involved in the 2010 crash, and for not suing the Ford Motor Co., maker of the van in which Parizo was a passenger.
Jenkins, the lawyer representing Parizo’s daughter, says the goal now in appealing the case to the state Supreme Court is to establish a new legal standard that would allow into evidence ethics rules that apply to lawyers.
Jenkins wants to see the rules, which usually only apply to the state panel that regulates lawyers, used in considering the full range of civil cases in which lawyers might be defendants.
“The first thing we’re looking to do is establish that the ethics rules are admissible (in civil cases),” Jenkins said. “All of the ethics rules. All of those rules are relevant (and should be) in play in a legal malpractice case.”
An ethics violation needn’t automatically determine the verdict in such a case, but the rules should be “evidence a jury can consider on whether a lawyer did his job,” Jenkins said.
There remains considerable animus between the two sides. Nuovo said that at a recent mediation meeting, Barron and Jenkins threatened to take their complaints to the Professional Responsibility Board. Nuovo called those statements an attempt at extortion.
“I know she’s doing this just to sort of get back at me,” Nuovo said of Barron. “I know she’s trying to bring this up because she felt that we didn’t settle on all of her specific terms. … And she’s following through on her threat that she’s going to go to the papers and report me to the conduct board for not paying her (an) amount of money, in the way, exactly, that she wanted.”
Barron replied in an interview that talk of renewing complaints about Nuovo to the state regulatory board was not an idle threat; she’s still planning to do that, she said.
Jenkins said there would be nothing underhanded about doing so. “Liza has a right to do that,” he said.
Jenkins added that the Professional Responsibility Board had indicated it could revisit the Nuovo case, particularly if a jury found that Nuovo had failed to get any fee agreement from Parizo, which was the jury’s ruling in October.
The message both from the board and the Vermont Supreme Court was, “if the jury finds otherwise, that there was no oral agreement, we want to know about it,” Jenkins said.
Nuovo “exploited Bobby Parizo, a vulnerable adult,” Jenkins said. “Bobby was Tom Nuovo’s longtime client. He trusted Tom and … got taken advantage of.”
Barron said she saw it this way: “What Mr. Nuovo and his firm did was a crime. They’ve been held accountable by a jury and they still feel like they’ve done nothing wrong.”
