The Florida Defense Lawyers Association held their annual Florida Liability Claims Conference between June 17-18 at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort on the Walt Disney World property in Orlando. The event was attended by insurance attorneys and professionals alike, including adjusters, corporate representatives from a number of institutional carriers and a host of medical and engineering experts.
Current topics coloring civil litigation throughout Florida were discussed, with panel discussion and seminar sessions held on Thursday and Friday. Callahan Fusco had the privilege of contributing to panel conversations regarding effective approaches to expert discovery in high medical damages cases, as well as attending discussions about the disparate treatment of defendants in Boecher expert discovery, the importance- and lost art- of professionalism in ongoing litigation and settlement discussions, and the strategic value and importance of independent medical examinations in insurance defense litigation. Other topics addressed at length in panel discussions or conference seminars included spoilation of evidence issues, both presuit and post-suit, evaluating the reasonableness of hospital billing, the effective use of courtroom visualizations at trial, the use of biomechanical and biomedical experts in premises liability litigation, emerging issues in Florida medical malpractice law and Florida’s recent shift back to the Daubert standard and the way that both increases the importance of foundational deposition discovery and opens the door for increased defense challenges to Plaintiff expert witnesses.
Individual sessions involved discussions as detailed as how to evaluate seat belt marks and what they tell litigators about occupant-belt relationships to broader discussions about defense-friendly or defense-averse trends in Florida case law. Ultimately, each seminar and panel discussion was aimed at better equipping practitioners with the procedural, substantive and ethical tools to refine and strengthen their motion, discovery and trial practice.
The FDLA Young Lawyers also proudly partnered with the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida to help provide hunger relief to families battling food need in the wake of the global pandemic that affected so many across the United States. This terrific partnership gave a philanthropic feel to an event that annually helps produce better lawyering and counsel across the state of Florida.