Blog of law articles

Herald columnist Jackie Bueno Soso goes off on the mom of slain Coral Gables High student Juan Carlos Rivera because she has hired Mike Haggard to investigate a possible lawsuit:

In the United States, public sympathy has an inverse correlation to the number of lawyers who surround you when you appear in public. The greater the number of lawyers, the less sympathy you'll get. That's especially true when they are trial lawyers. By appearing at the press conference flanked by finger-waving suits, Cruz no longer came across as a bereaved mother but as an opportunist ready to take advantage of our legal system.

Oh no -- angry blogger alert!!

Seriously, is Mike Haggard really just a "finger-waving suit"?

Jackie also is a legal scholar and already knows -- without any discovery or information obtained regarding school security issues at Coral Gables High -- that the mom's suit is shaky, according to "many" unnamed people who may or may not be lawyers but who may also be cable salesmen or Miami Beach lifeguards:

Now that she's here, she's thanking the community by threatening to sue its school system based on what many would consider a flimsy claim.

Exactly! The mom should be grateful to be here, and thankful the tragic murder of her son has allowed her to meet all these nice new people.

Note to Jackie -- I'm not a PI lawyer, so the "many" anonymous people you reference may be correct, but Mike Haggard is not exactly known for getting involved in a lot of "flimsy" lawsuits.

Indeed, just last year the DBR named him one of South Florida's Most Effective Lawyers (for a second time, btw).

(Sorry about FSU, Mike).

Lawsuits are not "expressions" of sympathy or thankfulness, or indications of the opposite. They are legal instruments that implicate rights and duties of the respective parties.

If she has legal rights she is certainly entitled to pursue them in a court of law, and that does not mean in some reductive, simplistic way that therefore she must not be appropriately "thankful" to Ros-Lehtinen for helping her travel to her son's funeral.

Also, I don't see in Jackie's column where she asked Mike for his perspective on the possible suit and what liability may exist and against whom. Maybe she should ask him?