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Florida lawsuit seeks lost pay for Butler & Hosch employees

 
Published May 22, 2015

TAMPA — A federal lawsuit seeking class-action status that has been filed against the law firm Butler & Hosch says hundreds of its workers laid off earlier this month, including up to 100 in Tampa, are owed three weeks' salary and were dismissed without the 60-day notice required by law.

The U.S. District Court lawsuit was filed Thursday in Fort Lauderdale by two South Florida employees of the firm, which was one of the largest banking foreclosure firms in Florida and the nation. It operated an office on Eisenhower Boulevard in Tampa.

The suit seeks class-action status on behalf of the 700 or more employees of the Dallas-based firm who were employed in Florida and 26 other states.

Butler & Hosch's collapse came as a surprise to Florida's busy foreclosure industry. The firm had been rapidly expanding its operations and its Tampa office was hiring as late as last month, according to online jobs listings.

But the firm's senior partner, Bob Hosch, sent a mass email to employees May 14 informing them the company did not have the cash to meet payroll and was closing its doors. Hosch blamed the collapse on having expanded the firm too rapidly

"The employees were provided with no notice, severance and barely an opportunity to gather their personal items before security badges and telephone extensions were deactivated," the lawsuit said. "By failing to disclose their true intentions to make mass layoffs in advance, (the firm) deceived their employees from looking for other work and/or making contingent plans while Butler & Hosch continued to operate unabated."

The lawsuit said the firm also had a round of layoffs in December, though it did not say how many employees were affected.

Officials representing Butler & Hosch could not be reached for comments Friday.

The firm handled up to 60,000 foreclosure cases nationally, and with three of its offices in Florida, Butler & Hosch was a major player among foreclosure plaintiffs attorneys in courthouses from Tampa Bay to Miami to Jacksonville.

Tampa Bay court clerks could not provide full figures Friday on how many foreclosure lawsuits Butler & Hosch handles. But the firm represents plaintiffs in 47 pending foreclosure sales in Hillsborough in the next few months and another 44 in Pinellas, according to the clerk of courts in those counties.

Substitute counsels are being appointed in many cases and most sales appear to be moving forward as scheduled.

Butler & Hosch is trying to sort out its debt in a state civil action called an "assignment for the benefit of creditors" that may allow the company to pay some of what its owes more quickly than it would through a bankruptcy filing.

St. Petersburg foreclosure defense attorney Matt Weidner said Butler & Hosch's closing is particularly stressful to the courts because they are rushing to finish spending what remains of funding set aside by state lawmakers to help clear foreclosure dockets. He said the spending deadline is June 30.

"This turmoil could not have come at a worse time for attorneys or the courts," he said. "The courts are in this sprint to clear out all their dockets. They're setting trials one after the other all over the state. We're all scrambling to keep up."

Contact William R. Levesque at levesque@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3432. Follow @Times_Levesque.

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