Lamh Foistenach Abu!
Posted on 04/14/2010 2:28:12 PM PDT by lqcincinnatus
EDINBURG — As wrongful death cases go, the one that almost predictably followed the fatal fall of construction worker Antonio Rivas in McAllen in May 2002 was unremarkable in every respect but one. A lawsuit against the company that employed Rivas was quickly filed by lawyers from the Watts Law Firm on behalf of Rivas' widow, Maria Zuniga, and his aging mother, Cayetana Rivas, who lived across the Rio Grande in a small border village.
In August 2003, the case was settled for $1.8 million, but that did not end the matter.
Now pending in Hidalgo County is another suit, naming Mikal Watts, Zuniga, and lawyers Hunter Craft and Charles Argento as defendants. It claims that Cayetana Rivas was deceived and cheated in her son's wrongful death suit.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
It accuses Argento and the lawyers for the Watts firm of prosecuting the wrongful death case without ever finding Rivas in Mexico, much less signing her up as a client, as required by state bar rules.
Instead, it claims, they got a granddaughter in Mexico with a similar name to sign a contract based on extravagant promises that ultimately proved empty.
“They told the court that they knew Cayetana Rivas, that they represented her and that they had her permission to represent her, all of which were false,” Robinson said.
The lawyers pocketed more than half the $1.8 million settlement, and Zuniga got most of the rest. Rivas, who had no role in the negotiations, received only $50,000 in the form of a check she could not cash in Mexico, according to the suit.
At the time, Rivas lived in “a one-room shanty at the edge of a cliff, with no running water, no electricity and only a latrine. Cooking was done outside of the structure, over an open fire,” according to the suit.
Willie Ben Daw III of Houston, who represents the Watts defendants, described the Rivas suit Friday as “a frivolous attempt to coerce money from one of the most successful law firms in the state.” He said that “Mr. Watts believes this case was handled correctly.”
In their filed answers to the suit, the defendants have repeated a series of general denials.
“Plaintiff has produced no evidence that the defendants had a fiduciary relationship at all with the plaintiff at the time in question, that the defendants breached any fiduciary relationship with the plaintiff, or that such breach injured the plaintiff or benefited the defendants,” reads one recent filing.
Rivas was illiterate and deaf. At a deposition in 2006, she appeared incapable of answering basic questions. In July 2008, she died of heart failure at 87. But the suit continues on behalf of her heirs.
Set for trial today in Edinburg, the case was unexpectedly reset late last week for September.
One of the defendants, Houston lawyer Argento, has already settled his portion of the case by paying $200,000. He declined Friday to comment. Craft did not return a phone call Friday. Watts referred inquiries to Daw.
One of the critical allegations of the suit is that the plaintiff's lawyers falsely claimed to have been retained by Rivas when they had never met her, and she was thus completely unaware of the litigation.
“The lawsuit was settled before Cayetana Rivas was notified that the lawsuit existed,” reads the suit.
E-mails attached as exhibits make it clear that the Watts lawyers knew about her soon after her son's death and quickly decided to name her as a plaintiff, as the “natural mother.”
“The decedent is said to not have any children but a surviving 90-year-old mother,” wrote Watts investigator Alfonso Gonzalez to a company lawyer May 20, 2002.
But he didn't find Cayetana Rivas, though the suit already listed her as a plaintiff.
Instead, he or someone else soon found Cayetana Coreno Rivas de Hernandez, 24, a granddaughter with a similar name, who allegedly was induced to sign a contract. In a statement in the court file, she described how it happened.
“The lawyer, Alfonso, talked to me and had me sign a contract of employment, I believe for my grandmother. He told me my grandmother would get half of the proceeds from the case where my uncle, Antonio Rivas, had died from injuries received at work. I wrote my name on the papers, which I did not understand because I do not read English,” Coreno Rivas de Hernandez said.
Daw denies that any Watts employee was involved in obtaining her signature.
By the summer of 2003, as the suit was nearing settlement, Rivas remained out of reach, according to another e-mail from Gonzalez.
“Certainly I will have to get down there to locate the surviving mother and convince her she should submit to being deposed,” he wrote Aug. 4, 2003.
“I have been advised she is outrageously old and unable to hear, that in fact one of her nieces signed the contract for her as she is just unable to,” he added.
Weeks later, with the suit settled, Gonzalez tracked her down in Valadese, Mexico. While the circumstances of what happened are unclear, the result was Cayetana Rivas putting her thumbprint on the release that ended her claims in the suit.
Contacted Friday, Gonzalez declined to comment, other than to deny wrongdoing.
After reviewing a copy of the pending suit, Tom Watkins, an Austin lawyer who is chairman of the Texas Supreme Court's task force to rewrite the disciplinary rules for lawyers, said the alleged absence of a contract is always a fatal flaw.
“If the allegations in the petition are true, they should forfeit their whole fee,” he said of the lawyers involved.
“If you don't have a contract to represent someone, you have no authority to file a lawsuit, and all the stuff that later went wrong flows from the fact that they started out wrong.”
None of this would likely have come to light, much less led to litigation, had Rivas been able to cash the $50,000 check she was given. But because she could not come to the U.S. and had no bank accounts in Mexico, the check could not be cashed.
After a grandson of Rivas went to lawyer Oscar Palacios in Pharr in 2003 seeking help, things began to heat up.
“When I started asking him questions, I found out this lawsuit had been settled for several million dollars and the lady wound up with $50,000,” Palacios said.
After receiving no help from the Watts firm, he got other lawyers involved, including Robinson, who eventually got the $50,000 to Rivas and filed a suit against the lawyers seeking much more.
And his mother is a State District Judge!
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
“There are two kinds of lawyers in the world. Those who sincerely want to help people and parasites.” Lazarus Long
I recall a similar case in Savannah a few years back. A disabled child was awarded several million dollars but only got $100,000. The lawyer got the rest.
Fortunately the probate judge figured out what was going on and made the lawyer give the money back.
On Valentine’s Day 2005, a civil trial opened in Crystal City, Texas, that would become notorious in the legal community but receive scant attention outside the state.
They found their man in Mikal Watts of Corpus Christi. Watts is the latest incarnation of the Texas gunslinger-litigator. He was only 38 years old (he turned 40 on July 17) when the Ford trial began, but he already carried a portfolio heavy with press clippings.
Sounds like that famous lawfirm, “Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe.”
Proof yet again that 99% of all lawyers give the other 1% a bad name.
My Mother’s Brother was killed in an industrial accident where he worked. He received a fairly large settlement tho I don’t recall how much.
His widow who was a bit naive went to a local attorney to handle the estate. Now they were not at all wealthy but owned over a thousand acres of land. That plus whatever else she would have gotten was worth a great deal.
She told the lawyer she didn’t have any money to pay him until the estate was settled. He told her that was OK, he would do it for 15 percent of the estate’s value. This of course would have been several hundred thousand dollars for a pretty simply case.
Fortunately there were several lawyers in the family and when one found out about it, he told her the fee was excessive and did it for free.
I do wonder if the judge would have approved that fee. He probably would have.
Poor woman. Too bad all that has absolutely nothing to do with anything about this case.
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