Courting Business

Dueling Gulf Coast business owners and senior executives with a dispute that ends up in court can agree on one thing: A court proceeding or a trial, even one where they end up on the winning side, can be a siphon on time, profits and many times both.

And not only can the cases themselves drag on, but the typical Gulf Coast civil courtroom can in of itself be a drag, with backlogs as deep as six months in some places.
With those potential delays in mind, a group of Hillsborough County attorneys and a few Tampa-area executives met with Judge Manuel Menendez, Jr. late in 2006. The goal was to get Menendez, the chief judge of the 13th Judicial Circuit Court in Hillsborough County, to sign off on a complex business litigation court.
The court would be set up to handle cases that are business versus business with at least $75,000 at stake, in addition to other business-centric disputes, such as employee contract injunctions and non-compete agreements.

The model for the Tampa court would be the federal business court system, which puts an emphasis on paperwork over in-person hearings and focuses on long-term case management. It would also be modeled on the 9th Judicial Circuit Court in Orlando, which had been operating a business-only court since 2004.