Fla. Attys Go From Shooting Hoops To Suing Nursing Homes

Law360 (March 14, 2025, 4:41 PM EDT) -- In some ways, the idea for Geoff Moore and Spencer Payne's new Orlando law firm focused on taking nursing home catastrophic injury and medical malpractice cases to trial was conceived on a basketball court.

Payne — who previously practiced at Morgan & Morgan PA, one of the country's largest personal injury firms — and Moore, a former shareholder at Florida boutique The Maher Law Firm, soft launched the aptly named Moore Payne Law PLLC in November. But Payne told Law360 Pulse the two plaintiffs' attorneys met over a decade ago playing in men's basketball leagues together in downtown Orlando.

"We struck up a friendship on the basketball court and then kind of saw our legal careers take shape and realized we did a lot of the same type of work, and we both had a passion for trying cases," Payne said. "Over time, we kind of put our heads together and said we're really entering the prime of our careers, so now is the time."

While the firm does other personal injury and medical malpractice work as well, Payne and Moore said it was important to them on a personal level to help nursing home patients, or often the families of deceased nursing home patients, take action against neglectful facilities.

"I would say a passion for both of us, and something that really is near and dear to my heart, are these nursing home cases," Moore said. "Because really, in my view, children and the elderly are the most vulnerable populations in our society. You're helpless when you're young and a lot of times, when you're really old, you're also helpless."

Payne's perspective comes in part from the time he spent early in his career at defense boutique Quintairos Prieto Wood & Boyer PA, where he represented nursing home operators, and assisted in investigating claims and interviewing nursing home staff.

He said that after a year or two, he wasn't getting any personal satisfaction defending big companies, so when he got the opportunity to switch sides and start work at Morgan & Morgan in 2017, he took it. But Payne said the experience he gained on the defense side was valuable.

"You really get to see how the sausage is made," Payne said. "I can kind of put myself in their shoes and say, 'Well, what's going to move the needle for my client now? What would I hate to hear as a defense lawyer defending this case?' And so I know what buttons to push."

The pair both worked on nursing home and medical malpractice cases at their former firms, but they wanted to team up to form a low-volume law firm that was specifically geared toward being trial-ready, only taking on the catastrophic injury cases where a lawyer can dive in deep and win big verdicts.

Part of that means developing close relationships with clients, who Moore said are all given the lawyers' cell phone numbers.

"So I'm texting with clients at night and on weekends," Moore said. "These cases, the way we litigate them, require us to put some form of our specialty forward, and to work to the point where we really have developed the case into a trial-ready type case. And to do that, it's really an intimate relationship with that client because there has to be a mutual trust."

With a more hands-on and selective approach, Payne said he and Moore are able to team up and do the bulk of the work on a case before ever even filing a complaint, which is a big part of how they hope to differentiate themselves in a crowded Orlando market.

"Winning a trial really does start on day one, even before the lawsuit gets filed," Payne said. "We're getting things ready because we like to be in a position where if the judge says, 'Hey, I can get you on the trial docket in six months,' we can say, 'OK, judge, we're ready to go.'"

Moore and Payne said they are looking for clients who will be compelling to a jury and who have injuries that are real and significant.

A lot of the nursing home cases they take on, for instance, involve wrongful death from falls, or situations involving "elopement," where a patient at a nursing home leaves the premises without notice or permission, usually due to a lack of supervision. This has resulted in some patients being struck by cars and killed, Moore said.

"The common theme you see throughout these cases is lack of staffing," he said. "Nursing homes are frequently cutting costs to their staff so there's not enough people, and you get things like elopement, where residents oftentimes with dementia aren't supervised and are in an almost childlike state. I have young kids, and if you don't watch them carefully, they might wander into the street, and the same thing happens with dementia or Alzheimer's patients."

Another common injury Moore and Payne said they see is bed sores, which can develop when a nursing home patient is left in their bed for too long without being turned or repositioned, and bed sores can grow and fester if left untreated.

"That's almost a presumption of negligence when that happens," Moore said. "People are left there, and if no one tends to them for a long period of time, there's a lack of blood flow and the skin starts to die, and it literally gets so bad sometimes that you see these hollowed out wounds. Both me and Spencer have been involved in cases where those wounds go as deep as the bone."

One harrowing case the pair are currently working on is a wrongful death suit on behalf of the family of a retired cardiologist who suffered a heart attack and died while staying overnight in a nursing home with his wife. According to Moore, the victim pressed the emergency pendant that was supposed to alert staff that a patient needed help, but no one responded. Hours later, staff found him dead.

Moore said when police came to investigate, they found the person in charge of tending to patients overnight had been smoking marijuana in his car and had fallen asleep.

"So that guy got arrested, but no one else in the facility helped him either," Moore said. "So this retired cardiologist for a prolonged period of time is sitting there asking for help, and he died by himself of a heart attack. The irony is so sad because he knows what's going on. He's a cardiologist. ... And nobody comes to save him. It's tragic."

Nursing home cases are often actually less of an uphill battle than medical malpractice cases, Payne said. While in malpractice lawsuits, juries tend to come in favoring the doctor because doctors receive special training and are often trusted by their communities, there's often more skepticism around the care provided by nursing homes.

"I think, generally speaking, people are a little wary of nursing homes and the type of care that they provide," Payne said. "They hear the horror stories in the news, and so I think it gives us a strategic advantage. And we know if we're going to trial, we're going to be coming with a case that is tragic and upsetting based on what we've uncovered and intend to present in terms of evidence. If we hit our marks, the jury is going to be with us."

But there is a bit of a challenge in representing victims or the families of victims who skew over the age of 80 years old.

"A lot of lawyers might look at a case involving a 90-year-old where they fall and break their hip and die, and say, 'Well, he was 90. There's probably no value there,'" Payne said. "And we've become very skilled, rightfully, at explaining the value of that person's life in that setting. Not all time is created equal, and when someone's only got a little bit of time left, it's that much more important they don't spend it in pain and that it's not taken away from them through the fault of someone else. We've gotten very good at framing that issue for the jury, and we've gotten some very good results."

Right now, the firm is just the two attorneys with some support staff, but Moore and Payne said their vision is to "become the preeminent trial law firm in Central Florida, particularly in catastrophic injury cases."

This will likely mean hiring some more attorneys to meet demand, but Moore said that ultimately he wants to keep the firm small.

"Our goal is not growth," Moore said. "Our goal is to maintain a quality representation. We really don't want to compromise on the quality of the representation that we intend to give the community." --Editing by Lakshna Mehta.

By Rachel Rippetoe