11th Circuit upholds sanctions for frivolous disability rights lawsuits

ATLANTA (CN) — A Florida man who filed more than 130 disability discrimination lawsuits will have to pay fines and serve community service for his role in an unethical fee-sharing arrangement with the now-suspended attorney who represented him.

In a unanimous opinion issued Tuesday, an 11th Circuit panel upheld a federal judge’s ruling subjecting Alexander Johnson and his attorney Scott Dinin to sanctions for running an “illicit joint enterprise” to profit from inflated legal fees in federal lawsuits over disability access.

Dinin filed 653 lawsuits alleging violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act between November 2013 and March 2019. Johnson was a plaintiff in 131 of them.

More than two dozen of the cases focused on the lack of closed captioning on television features at gas pumps in the Miami area, which Johnson alleged limited access for the hearing impaired. Other lawsuits focused on website accessibility.

But what appeared to be a righteous crusade for the rights of deaf and disabled people was less than sincere.

Writing on behalf of the panel Tuesday, U.S. Circuit Judge Beverly Martin, a Barack Obama appointee, explained that the scheme involved filing frivolous claims, misrepresenting the billable hours involved in working on the cases, and splitting legal fees 50-50.

In 2019, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Huck in the Southern District of Florida imposed sanctions against Johnson and Dinin for their “self-dealing” behavior. The Bill Clinton-appointed judge ruled that the duo had a “selfish motive in bringing these cases which benefit no one except Johnson and Dinin.”

Dinin was ordered to pay more than $50,000 in penalties to a disability rights group. Johnson was hit with $6,000 in sanctions and told to complete 50 hours of community service annually for three years.

The panel rejected arguments made by Johnson’s new attorney during oral arguments in July alleging that he is being unfairly penalized for the actions of his old attorney.

According to Tuesday’s ruling, emails between the two men showed that they were “motivated by monetary payment alone” and demonstrate that Johnson “played the role of the ‘mastermind’ behind the frivolous cases.”

In one email, Johnson told Dinin to remove a sentence from a complaint which he believed would “sabotage” the profitability of their scheme. Johnson objected to language which indicated that gas station owners could avoid ADA liability if they turned off the gas pump videos.

“We do not need to sabotage our other cases by providing defendants a defense by giving them a partial remedy and answer to our complaints,” Johnson wrote, according to the ruling.

Martin wrote that the email clearly shows the motivation behind the lawsuits was strictly to obtain payment of legal fees, as opposed to compliance with the law.

“The district court found this to show that Mr. Johnson was driven by fees he and Mr. Dinin could collect rather than by a desire to remove barriers to access for people who are hearing impaired,” the ruling states. “Mr. Johnson was instructing Mr. Dinin to remove language from the complaint that could have alerted defendants to a way to equalize everyone’s experience at gas pumps, without any apparent concern that shutting off the videos does nothing for the hearing impaired who may have desired to watch the videos with captioning.”

The ruling points out that even when the cases ended in settlement agreements, the agreements resulted only in payment of Johnson’s legal fees and costs. Settlements that included remedial relief did not actually provide closed captioning to the videos but instead caused the videos to be turned off entirely.

The email supported the entry of sanctions against Johnson, the panel decided.

An attorney for Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The panel also found that Dinin “egregiously inflated his attorney’s fees claims by overbilling for simple, repetitive tasks and by billing for work which he did not perform.”

Martin wrote that Huck correctly determined that the fee-splitting scheme was a “serious ethical transgression” in violation of Florida Bar rules.

Dinin does not have legal standing to appeal the sanctions against him, the ruling states.

In a three-page opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Luck, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote separately to note his disagreement with a footnote in the majority’s opinion which rejected Huck’s ruling to the extent that it dismissed Johnson’s ADA claim in one of the gas station cases for lack of standing.  

Martin and Luck were joined on the panel by U.S Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an Obama appointee.

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