Tommy D. Roebig operates in the upper tier of the plaintiff’s trial bar, leading the general negligence division as a partner at the multi-state litigation firm Florin|Roebig. His specific practice lanes encompass catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, medical malpractice, discrimination and civil rights, liquor liability, product liability, and motor-vehicle negligence. Maintaining an exceptionally high benchmark, the average contested jury verdict obtained for clients by Roebig and his partner exceeds $1 million. Roebig’s career metrics are defined by historic, precedent-setting victories across the state of Florida, including a $47.4 million sexual battery verdict, a $42 million dram shop liability verdict, and a monumental $200 million wrongful death judgment. His core legal philosophy utilizes the civil justice system as an uncompromising mechanism to force corporate accountability, prioritizing clients’ injuries over defense convenience and refusing to accept sanitized defense narratives when victims suffer catastrophic harm.

In the high-stakes arena of catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death litigation, the geographic venue of a trial often dictates the defense strategy. For decades, the counties surrounding Tampa Bay—including Pasco, Hernando, and Sumter—have been widely regarded by corporate defense counsel as reliably conservative, jurisdictionally hostile terrain for plaintiffs seeking outsized damage awards. Insurers and corporate conglomerates routinely leverage the conservative leanings of these jury pools to force low-dollar settlements, betting that local juries will hesitate to return massive verdicts against well-known brands or local businesses.

Tommy D. Roebig has spent a career dismantling that assumption. As a partner at the Palm Harbor-based litigation firm Florin|Roebig, he has repeatedly pierced corporate veils (the legal distinction separating the actions of a corporation from its individual owners or subsidiaries), neutralized aggressive defense tactics, and secured a succession of record-breaking jury verdicts in some of Florida’s most traditionally unyielding venues. Holding an exceedingly rare triple board certification—in Civil Trial Law from both the Florida Bar and the National Board of Trial Advocacy, alongside a certification as a Civil Pretrial Practice Advocate—Roebig operates at the upper tier of the plaintiff’s trial bar.

His practice is defined by a refusal to accept the sanitized narratives offered by defense teams representing national franchises, healthcare conglomerates, and liability insurers. Through rigorous application of civil rights doctrines, premises liability law, and the rules of corporate vicarious liability (the legal doctrine assigning responsibility to an employer or principal for the actions of its employees or agents), Roebig has transformed the civil courtroom into an engine of public accountability. His record demonstrates a systematic approach to transferring the true cost of gross negligence, exploitation, and catastrophic harm back onto the entities that enabled it.

Dismantling the Independent Contractor Defense

One of the most persistent strategies utilized by corporations to evade liability for the actions of their workers is the “independent contractor” defense. By classifying frontline service providers as independent contractors rather than employees, corporate entities attempt to insulate their assets from the misconduct, negligence, or predatory behavior of the people who interact directly with the public. Roebig’s landmark 2014 victory against a Tampa Bay area day spa stands as a masterclass in breaking this legal shield.

The case involved a vulnerable plaintiff, identified in court as Jane Doe, who sought treatment at Essentials Massage and Facial of New Tampa for a neck injury. During the session, she was sexually assaulted by the licensed massage therapist assigned to her. When Roebig brought the civil action, the corporate defendant deployed the standard liability shield: the therapist was an independent contractor licensed by the Florida Department of Health, and therefore the spa could not be held vicariously liable for his intentional, criminal acts.

Roebig refused to let the corporation distance itself from the violence committed under its roof. During the trial, he methodically deconstructed the employment relationship, proving to the jury that the therapist functioned as an employee of the corporation. More critically, Roebig exposed a devastating trail of corporate negligence. He presented evidence that the spa had retained the therapist even after it should have known that he had wrongfully touched another female client at the exact same location just ninety days prior.

By shifting the legal focus from the isolated act of the assailant to the systemic negligence of the corporation, Roebig invoked the doctrine of negligent retention. The jury’s response was historic. They returned a $47.4 million verdict—the largest contested jury verdict in Pasco County history. Crucially, the verdict included $12 million for the plaintiff’s pain and suffering and $35 million in punitive damages against the assailant, while triggering the corporation’s liability insurance. The trial exposed the profound moral hazard of the independent contractor defense, establishing that a business cannot profit from a service while willfully ignoring the predatory risks posed by its providers.

Dram Shop Litigation and Corporate Accountability

Florida’s comparative negligence (a legal defense that reduces a plaintiff’s compensation by the percentage of fault attributed to their own actions) framework often makes holding corporate hospitality chains accountable for alcohol-related catastrophes extraordinarily difficult. Defense attorneys routinely argue that the intoxicated individual bears the ultimate responsibility for their injuries, seeking to minimize the culpability of the establishment that supplied the liquor. In 2016, Roebig navigated these hostile legal waters to secure a $42 million verdict against the national restaurant chain Applebee’s.

The plaintiff, Patrick Osmond, was twenty years old when he and his friends were served alcohol at a Hernando County Applebee’s franchise. After drinking at the establishment, Osmond rode in the bed of a pickup truck that subsequently crashed into a tree, rendering him a quadriplegic. The defense aggressively leaned into comparative fault, pointing to the underage drinking and the inherently dangerous decision to ride in a truck bed, attempting to place the entirety of the blame on the young men.

Roebig utilized Florida’s dram shop statutes (laws that hold commercial establishments liable for damages caused by unlawfully serving alcohol to minors or visibly intoxicated patrons), which provide a mechanism to hold vendors liable if they willfully and unlawfully sell or furnish alcoholic beverages to a person who is not of lawful drinking age. Roebig argued that the restaurant’s blatant failure to enforce basic age-verification protocols was the initial, proximate cause of the catastrophic chain of events. He framed the corporate pursuit of profit—selling pitchers of beer to obvious minors—as a breach of a fundamental public duty.

The Hernando County jury, sitting in a famously conservative jurisdiction, returned a staggering $42 million verdict, the largest contested jury verdict in the county’s history. While the jury did assign a percentage of comparative fault to the plaintiff and the driver, the sheer magnitude of the gross verdict forced Applebee’s to the negotiating table. To avoid the risk and exposure of an appeal, the corporate chain agreed to a confidential settlement that secured the lifelong medical care required for the paralyzed plaintiff. The case underscored Roebig’s ability to force corporate hospitality networks to internalize the catastrophic costs of their regulatory violations.

The Civil Court as the Ultimate Forum for Truth

While Roebig is a formidable adversary to corporate risk managers, his practice also extends to complex wrongful death litigation where the criminal justice system has failed to provide a remedy. In instances of profound violence or suspected murder, the state’s burden of proof—beyond a reasonable doubt—can sometimes paralyze prosecutors, leaving grieving families without answers or justice. In these vacuums, aggressive civil litigation becomes the only avenue for accountability.

This dynamic was starkly illustrated in the highly publicized 2025 civil trial concerning the death of Dr. Stephen Schwartz, a respected Florida physician who was brutally murdered in his home. Despite intense police scrutiny and a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing toward his wife, Rebecca, the state declined to press criminal homicide charges, citing a lack of direct physical evidence placing her at the scene. For years, the murder remained officially unresolved, and the suspect remained entirely free of state consequence.

Retained by the Schwartz family, Roebig and his trial team utilized the civil court’s burden of proof—a preponderance of the evidence—to try the murder case that the state would not. The defense was incredibly well-funded, spending over $5 million in attorney’s fees to protect the widow’s assets and reputation, arguing that the absence of a criminal indictment precluded civil liability.

Over the course of a gruelling trial, Roebig and his partners systematically dismantled the defense’s narrative, presenting deep forensic evidence, financial motives, and character testimony that painted a chilling picture of familial betrayal. The jury found the defendant liable for the murder of her husband, awarding the family a monumental $200 million in damages. Featured on CBS’s 48 Hours and NBC’s Dateline, the verdict was one of the largest of its kind in national history. More importantly, it demonstrated the vital, independent function of the plaintiff’s bar: when police and prosecutors walk away, specialized civil trial lawyers possess the tools, the capital, and the courage to force a public reckoning.

While the $200 million judgment stands as one of the largest of its kind in national history, the operational reality of securing a nine-figure verdict against a single individual raises immediate questions regarding collectability. In practice, only a fraction of the award will likely be collected from the defendant’s available assets. However, the primary utility of such an astronomical judgment extends far beyond immediate financial recovery; its symbolic and practical purpose is to definitively establish public accountability and legal culpability where the state apparatus failed. As his law partner Will Florin noted following the trial, the civil system guarantees a “chance of justice” rather than an absolute guarantee, but in this instance, it provided the grieving family with essential closure and a profound moral victory against an otherwise untouchable perpetrator.

Pedagogy, Peer Recognition, and Institutional Influence

The mechanical execution of a multi-million-dollar trial requires an encyclopedic command of evidence, civil procedure, and human psychology. Roebig’s dominance in the courtroom is undergirded by a rigorous academic and pedagogical foundation. A native Floridian, he earned his undergraduate degree at Florida State University before attending Stetson University College of Law, where he distinguished himself as a Dana Scholar and a member of the National Moot Court Team.

His connection to legal academia has remained a constant throughout his career. Recognizing the importance of cultivating a fearless and highly competent plaintiff’s bar, Roebig has served as an adjunct professor at St. Petersburg College, teaching civil law courses, and is a frequently requested guest lecturer at his alma mater, Stetson University College of Law, where he instructs on the complex calculation of negligence and wrongful death damages.

The legal establishment has consistently recognized his impact. In 2019, Roebig was inducted into the Stetson University College of Law Hall of Fame—an honor bestowed upon only 89 individuals in the institution’s 120-year history, reserved for those who have reached the absolute pinnacle of their legal fields. He has been voted by his peers into Best Lawyers in America every year since 2008 and was specifically named “Lawyer of the Year” for Personal Injury Litigation in the St. Petersburg area in 2017 and 2023. He is a life member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum and has been named among the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in Florida by the National Trial Lawyers Association continuously since 2009.

A Legacy of Confronting powerful defendants

The modern civil justice system is heavily tilted in favor of well-capitalized defendants. Insurance companies, hospital networks, and franchise conglomerates employ vast legal departments dedicated exclusively to minimizing payouts and burying valid claims in procedural attrition (a defense strategy of intentionally dragging out litigation through endless motions and delays to exhaust a plaintiff’s resources). Navigating this asymmetry requires a plaintiff’s attorney with both the financial resources to endure years of trench warfare and the trial acumen to credibly threaten a catastrophic jury verdict.

Tommy D. Roebig’s career is a testament to the power of that threat. By securing precedent-setting verdicts, he has materially altered the risk calculus for corporate defendants operating in Florida. Specifically, his record includes a $15 million trucking negligence award in 2005 (which stood as the 4th largest reported verdict in the state at the time), a $7.6 million premises liability judgment in 2018 for a dangerous condition (ranked by Top Verdict as the largest amount for such a claim in Florida that year), and an $8 million jury verdict in 2024 against a Day Spa Corporation in Pasco County for negligence and assault committed by a retained massage therapist. While the exact case names and corporate identities of the defendants in these three specific matters are unavailable in the provided source material, the verified judgment amounts remain a matter of permanent record. He does not merely settle cases; he takes them to the mat, exposing negligent hiring practices, profit-driven safety failures, and the exploitation of vulnerable individuals.

To ensure accessibility for victims facing well-capitalized institutions, Roebig’s firm operates on a standard contingency fee model, meaning clients face no upfront costs and pay no attorney fees unless the firm successfully wins the case and recovers compensation. However, as an elite, high-stakes litigation practice, there is a strict real-world context to their case selection. Roebig does not accept all inquiries; his anti-use cases explicitly include minor, low-dollar injury claims or those strictly limited by minimal insurance policy limits. The firm’s resources are structurally reserved for complex, catastrophic injury, high-exposure liability, and significant rights-based litigation where their formidable capital and trial acumen are necessary to overcome entrenched defense teams.

For the victims of corporate indifference and individual malice, Roebig provides a vital counterweight. His practice serves as a permanent reminder to powerful entities that no corporate structure is dense enough, and no defense budget is large enough, to guarantee immunity from a relentlessly litigated public trial.

Navigating Florida’s Tort Reform and Future Outlook

The landscape of Florida personal injury and wrongful death law underwent a seismic shift with the passage of House Bill 837 in March 2023, legislation heavily supported by the insurance industry and corporate defense lobbies. The sweeping tort reform replaced Florida’s longstanding pure comparative negligence system with a modified comparative negligence framework. Under this new paradigm, if a plaintiff is found to be more than 50% at fault for their own injuries, they are entirely barred from recovering any damages, creating a strict cutoff that defense attorneys will aggressively weaponize to push liability onto victims. The legislation also dramatically shortened the statute of limitations for general negligence claims from four years to two years and restricted the use of contingency-fee multipliers when calculating attorneys’ fees.

In this new, inherently more hostile legal environment, Roebig’s strategic future outlook relies heavily on exhaustive early-stage evidence collection and superior pre-trial advocacy to prevent defense teams from successfully shifting blame past the critical 50% threshold. Notably, because medical malpractice claims were specifically exempted from this change and remain under the pure comparative negligence framework, Roebig’s dual expertise across both general negligence and medical liability allows him to navigate these disparate legal standards seamlessly. His established willingness to invest millions in forensic reconstruction and trial preparation ensures his practice remains structurally insulated against legislative attempts to chill complex litigation, positioning him to continue holding corporate negligence accountable despite the newly elevated procedural barriers.