A bankruptcy official has accused a White Plains law firm and three lawyers of legal malpractice for allegedly mishandling a lawsuit that cost a client $3.7 million.
Mark Dottore, a trustee for the United States Twirling Association, sued Silverson, Pareres & Lombardi LLP and attorneys Joseph C. Marchese III, Paul J. Bottari, and Stephen M. Marcellino Jr., Sept. 26 in Westchester Supreme Court. He is demanding $4 million.
“But for defendants’ legal malpractice, the USTA would have secured a more favorable outcome,” the complaint states.
“We don’t comment on pending litigation,” defense attorney Bottari stated in a brief telephone conversation.
The USTA is a nonprofit sports organization based in Huntington Station, Suffolk County. Last year, a jury held the USTA responsible for $3.7 million in damages to a baton twirler.
Then USTA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, declaring $255,339 in assets and $3,706,223 in liabilities. Dottore was appointed as liquidating trustee to manage the assets on behalf of creditors.
Dottore’s allegations stem from a 2022 federal lawsuit filed against the USTA by an elite twirler who is referred to in court papers as Jane Doe. Silverson, Pareres & Lombardi represented the USTA.
In 2019, the twirler claimed, Walter Jacobo, president of the Lima, Peru Lions Club, invited the USTA to send representatives to Lima to serve as baton-twirling ambassadors for the United States.
USTA president Karen Cammer extended the invitation to Jane Doe and other twirlers, and she assigned a chaperone to accompany them. The invitation, according to the lawsuit, promised that private security and national government guards would protect the twirlers while they were in Peru.
Jane Doe, who was 17, alleged that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Jacobo in Peru.
Last year, Jane Doe was awarded $4.2 million. The jury apportioned 88% of the fault ($3.7 million) to the USTA and 12% ($504,000) to the chaperone.
Dottore claims that the USTA lawyers made “fundamental errors and omissions that no reasonably competent attorney would have committed.”
Their strategy was to hold Jacobo responsible for the sexual assault, according to Dottore, but they failed to bring him into the lawsuit as a third party. As a result, the USTA lost its strongest defense, the jury could not apportion fault to Jacobo and that ensured that nearly all liability would be attributed to the USTA.
Dottore cites a comment by the trial judge that depicted the defense attorneys discovery practices as “abysmal.”
The USTA lawyers allegedly failed to depose witnesses who attended the Lima trip, for example, and failed to obtain a deposition from a key witness in Peru.
“The cumulative effect of defendants’ malpractice,” Dottore claims, “was catastrophic.” If Jacobo had been brought into the case, he estimated, the jury would have apportioned at least 75% of the liability to him.
Besides the $3.7 million jury verdict, Dottore says, the USTA spent more than $1 million on defense costs.
Dottore is represented by White Plains attorney Brian S. Cohen, of Lachtman Cohen & Belowich LLP.
