James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich, P.A. is run with the precision and dedication of a prosecutor’s office, because the firm’s founding partners were all career federal and state prosecutors before entering private practice. Just like their early days, Chris Hoyer and Judy Hoyer continue to work side by side with elite and award winning investigators including, former FBI agents and investigative journalists. Together, they work with a team of specialized attorneys to develop the facts that make a difference in their clients’ cases.
How it all began
The firm owes its start to an election-year defeat. In 1992, the firm’s founding group of lawyers, prosecutors led by Bill James, the elected chief prosecutor in Tampa, Florida, had to start fresh after losing a close re-election bid. They saw themselves with few options. “We could learn to practice law the way everyone else was, or we could do what we knew how to do,” recalled Chris Hoyer, who was James’ second-in-command during their eight years in the state prosecutor’s office.The former prosecutors found that class-actions gave them another way to attack consumer fraud as an alternative to criminal law. The discovery led them to a new niche in civil litigation. The James, Hoyer lawyers essentially became civil prosecutors representing consumers and taxpayers, case by case.
When Chris Hoyer, his wife Judy, and Bill James worked together as federal prosecutors in central Florida, they collaborated with FBI agents to win convictions for white-collar fraud, organized crime and political corruption. In the new firm, formed in 1993 with their friend and attorney John Newcomer and several retired FBI agents, they applied the same working methods.
Making a Mark
The firm was only a few months old when a former agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company arrived at the door with a complaint. He said the nation’s largest insurance company had used fraudulent tactics to sell nurses life insurance policies disguised as annuity investments. The allegations led the lawyers to file a class-action lawsuit accusing MetLife of deceptive sales practices. There was no precedent for such a complaint against an insurance company of MetLife’s size and reputation, Chris Hoyer recalled. “Other class-action firms looked at us with amusement,” Hoyer said. “We had a lot of self-doubt, because it was hard to believe what had been going on at MetLife.” Evidence continued to mount as the lawyers pursued the case. In 1994, MetLife agreed to make full refunds of up to $76-million to 60,000 customers. It was a dollar for dollar refund to the victims, something almost unheard of in settlements. Complete victory. The insurance company also agreed to pay a record $20-million fine to insurance regulators across the country.
The MetLife case prompted scrutiny of sales practices in the nation’s entire insurance industry. The firm subsequently brought suit against numerous other insurance companies, including Prudential, John Hancock, and State Farm. Since 1994, James, Hoyer and its collaborating law firms have negotiated settlements returning more than $3.2-billion to victims of fraud nationwide.
Areas of Expertise
The firm’s cases extend far beyond insurance matters to encompass many areas of consumer fraud and product liability. Central to the firm’s practice is the belief that even relatively small consumer frauds — in which an individual’s damages are a few hundred dollars or less — can be effectively remedied through class-action litigation.
In 1998, James, Hoyer grew substantially when it merged with a group of lawyers experienced in representing insurance companies. These lawyers, Terry Smiljanich and John Yanchunis, now practice exclusively on behalf of the victims of fraud but with the keen insight gained from their experience and knowledge of the insurance industry. In June 2000, James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich, P.A. along with its co-counsel negotiated a $215-million class-action settlement with insurer American General Corp., on behalf of thousands of African-American customers who were systematically overcharged for small burial policies on the basis of race. The firm also sued the Carson hair-care products conglomerate on behalf of African-American women whose hair fell out after using a relaxer.
James, Hoyer also has substantial experience representing whistleblowers who have disclosed fraud and seek the return of misappropriated government funds. In such actions, also called qui tam’s or False Claims Act cases, the whistleblower is eligible to receive a portion of the amount recovered. The firm represented the first whistleblowers in the Columbia/HCA Medicare fraud case, which gained national attention and involved the misappropriation of nearly two billion in taxpayer dollars. The firm also exposed widespread fraud involving government-insured prescriptions at two of the nation’s largest drugstore chains, Walgreens and Eckerd.
Critical to the firm’s success is its reliance on experienced investigators — veteran FBI agents and investigative journalists from print and television — who document fraud. Our attorney/investigator ratio is unique, because we believe having strong investigators develop the facts of a case, lays the foundation for our success.
The path taken by James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich, P.A. has not been an obvious one, in that there was little precedent for class-action fraud litigation. “We took enormous risks that other people wouldn’t take,” Hoyer said about the firm’s first years. As a result, after 18 years of fighting fraud, James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich, P.A., has carved a place as one of the nation’s top investigative law firms.