Tommy
D. Roebig

Rebecca Schwartz sat for a deposition in 2016 in the wrongful-death suit that her late husband’s three children had filed against her in Pinellas County. Wil Florin asked whether she had been present in the Tarpon Springs home when Dr. Steven Schwartz was killed and whether she had taken part in killing him. She refused to answer any question from Florin or from his partner, Tommy D. Roebig, and gave the same reply each time: “I reassert my rights under Article I Section 9 of the Florida Constitution.” The jury that watched that video nine years later found, on March 4, 2025, that she had “unlawfully and intentionally killed, or participated in procuring the death” of her husband, and it awarded his children $199,071,904. No prosecutor had charged her by then, and the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney, Bruce Bartlett, said the homicide file would “remain open until such time as we gather sufficient evidence to make an arrest.”

Roebig has tried civil cases in Pasco, Hernando, Sumter, Pinellas and other Florida counties for four decades, in jurisdictions long regarded as among the most demanding venues in the state for a plaintiff’s verdict. His practice includes catastrophic injury, wrongful death, premises liability, negligent hiring and supervision, liquor liability, commercial trucking, product claims and other contested civil matters, and it has produced jury awards of a million dollars or more in federal and state court in medical malpractice, discrimination and civil rights, liquor liability, product liability, class action and motor-vehicle negligence cases. With Florin he holds courtroom records that include the largest contested jury verdicts in Pasco, Hernando and Sumter County history and the largest contested personal-injury verdict in the Clearwater civil division, and at various times over the past thirty years the two have held the records for the largest contested jury verdict, the largest medical-malpractice verdict and the largest probate-division verdict in Pinellas County. The Schwartz verdict is the largest of them and one of the largest contested wrongful-death verdicts ever returned in the nation. It came out of the same work that produced the others: civil discovery, financial records, depositions, and a verdict form that let the jurors say exactly what they had decided.

May 28, 2014

Dr. Steven Schwartz was a seventy-four-year-old kidney specialist in Tarpon Springs whose medical practice and rental properties had produced an estate estimated at twenty to thirty million dollars. His medical partner, Dr. Robert Patton, called him a “gentle giant” who was dedicated to medicine “like no physician I’ve ever known,” and Florin, describing his habit of giving money to patients who could not pay, said simply, “Everybody loved him.” His life also contained a buried first act. In 1961, at twenty-one, he had robbed and killed a dentist, Dr. Victor Cook, in Hobbs, New Mexico, over gambling debts; Phillip Dyer, who drove him there and backed out, recalled him saying, “I shot the man between the eyes.” Schwartz served nine years in prison, had the sentence commuted and was later pardoned, studied medicine in Italy, and kept the history from his own children. His son Carter, who wanted to become a physician “just like him,” said his father “turned it into a positive” and “did everything he could to pay back society.”

Rebecca Schwartz, his second wife, had been with him since the late 1990s, when they met through a dating service, and she managed the medical office and the investments. On the evening of May 28, 2014, at about 9 p.m., she called 911 to report a burglary at the couple’s waterfront home on Belcher Drive: drawers and closets pulled open, jewelry, cash and watches missing, and, on the list she gave, a kitchen knife. She told the operator she had not seen her husband since she left at 8:30 that morning: “He’s a physician, so I don’t know where he is, actually. One of the hospitals, I assume.” Deputies who went in looking for an intruder found Dr. Schwartz in the garage, at the bottom of the stairs, in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice, stabbed in the neck and scalp, and strangled with his own tie, and his spine was fractured, apparently in the fall. The hard drive from the home’s security system was gone, and neither the gun nor the knife was ever found. Detective John Diebel of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office concluded that the burglary had been staged: the drawers were pulled out but had not been searched, watch boxes looked dropped rather than rifled, the dogs had been shut inside the bedroom that was supposedly burglarized, and the recorder had been kept in a closet above the garage where only someone who knew the house would look. The effort, he said, seemed designed to make the crime look like a “burglary gone bad.”

Investigators interviewed Rebecca first. She called her husband her “best bud,” and when they shared their theory of the case she responded, “You think you can find who did this?” Fingerprints on the security system matched her oldest son from a prior marriage, and detectives went to his workplace in Wisconsin before ruling him out; he had been at a doctor’s appointment with his pregnant wife. About a year after the killing, DNA on several pieces of the doctor’s clothing, including his shirt and a pocket, came back to Anton Leo Stragaj, an Albanian national who had come to the United States in 2000, earned more than $100,000 a year doing the Schwartzes’ remodeling and maintenance, and renovated the houses Rebecca bought without her husband’s knowledge. “That guy took care of my everything,” Stragaj said of the doctor. “He supported my family in Albania.” He said he had found the body that morning when Rebecca sent him to the house for a handbag she had left behind, shook the doctor to see whether he was alive, took the purse and left without calling anyone, because he feared deportation; when he returned the purse and demanded to know why she had killed her husband, she said nothing at first and then, he claimed, “I know you know why I did it.” His cell-phone records did not match his alibi. He was arrested in April 2015 and charged with first-degree murder, the only person ever charged, and he pointed at Rebecca: “She planned it for a long time.” Police listed her as a person of interest and did not charge her; her lawyers said the only evidence against her was the accused man’s word.

The Will, the Store and the Grow House

Steven Schwartz’s children, Casey Schwartz, Kelly May and Carter Schwartz, filed a wrongful-death action against Rebecca Schwartz and Stragaj on May 25, 2016, alleging that the two had conspired to kill their father. Florin and Roebig brought it for them. The case proceeded for nearly nine years before trial in 2025, and Rebecca had not been criminally charged by the time it reached a jury, so the record against her had to be built by the plaintiffs with the tools civil discovery provides. Roebig and Florin used them to develop a complex record involving family finances, estate planning, digital surveillance, forensic evidence and competing accounts of what occurred inside the home, work that a prosecutor would otherwise have done.

The money came first. The complaint alleged that Rebecca embezzled from the practice for years, hid it by deleting emails and threatening staff who found it, and sent the money to her children from a prior marriage; that she had earlier been convicted of embezzling from a chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving; that after the doctor gave money to patients she told office staff, “I could just shoot him,” and called the marriage a “temporary situation”; and that she “cut off all support to Steven P. Schwartz’s natural children, while lavishing monies on her own natural children.” Carter Schwartz said she had been moving money from joint accounts into accounts only she controlled: “It became very apparent early on, her motive was financial.” About a year before the killing the doctor revised his will, leaving everything to Rebecca and nothing to his three children, a change Carter said he could not explain. The plaintiffs’ evidence traced funds to a marijuana grow house she ran with Stragaj, to a plane bought for a boyfriend, to an Alaskan cruise for her extended family, and to a Verizon Wireless store in Wisconsin bought for one of her sons. Florin’s account after the verdict was that the doctor had caught her embezzling once and threatened divorce, which would have left her with little, and that when she was “caught red-handed” taking money again for the Verizon store, “this time it was enough.”

The plaintiffs also alleged that Stragaj was sent to the house afterward to clean up: to take the hard drive from the surveillance system and, with a butcher knife, to try to dig the bullets out. The forensic evidence, Florin said, showed that the doctor was shot twice in the head as he went down the stairs to leave for his morning hospital rounds. The depositions filled in the household. A former employee of the practice testified that everyone in the office suspected Rebecca had arranged the killing, that she kept such close tabs on her husband that she “always knew where he was,” and that she had him check whether the doctor had read particular emails while she stood lookout. A daughter-in-law testified that Rebecca bought fixer-upper houses without her husband’s knowledge and had Stragaj renovate them, that after the doctor died she bought homes and a brewery for her own children and had his son removed from a condominium his father owned, and that she had moved on so quickly it raised the family’s suspicion. Dana Nichols, married to Rebecca’s son Ben, told Florin under questioning that she believed Rebecca was involved and had staged the burglary to implicate Ben, who was never named in the suit or charged. Another deposition described Rebecca visiting a former best friend in the hospital after a suicide attempt, leaning down and whispering, “I wish you would have died.”

CBS’s 48 Hours broadcast the case as The Strange Life of Dr. Schwartz on February 11, 2017, with Roebig and Florin on camera for the children. “The person that benefitted was Becky Schwartz and the people that she deems worthy of giving away Dr. Schwartz’s money to,” Roebig said. “And we’ve alleged that Leo and Becky conspired to murder him.” He measured the widow’s conduct against what a widow would be expected to do: a grieving widow, he reasoned, would be “standing on a doorstep of the police department every morning,” saying, “Have you made any progress finding out who violently shot strangled and stabbed my husband?” Rebecca had instead sold the medical practice and moved to Winneconne, Wisconsin. Florin said of her silence, “She’s got something to hide. And that something is her involvement in the murder.” Rebecca declined to speak to the program; her lawyers said she was a victim who had nothing to do with the killing and that the suit was about the children’s greed for their father’s money.

Stragaj spent six years in the Pinellas County Jail. In August 2021 he pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact, a lesser felony than the murder he had been charged with, received an eight-year sentence with credit for time served, and after his 2022 release was deported to Albania that September. Detective Diebel believed Stragaj had been directly involved but concluded that his repeated lies made his account too unreliable to carry a prosecution of Rebecca. With the plea, the criminal case against the only charged defendant was finished, and the civil case was the one still moving.

Clear and Convincing

The trial in Pinellas County ran about a month in early 2025, with Roebig, Florin, Shaun Cummings and John Hart for the children, and the 2016 deposition in which Rebecca Schwartz repeatedly invoked the privilege against self-incrimination went to the jury on video. Under Baxter v. Palmigiano, decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1976, the Fifth Amendment does not forbid adverse inferences against parties to civil actions, and a Florida civil jury may hold a party’s refusal to answer against her, where a criminal jury could not. The inference did not substitute for proof. The plaintiffs still carried the burden of proving their wrongful-death case by a preponderance of the evidence, and because they sought punitive damages they had to establish their entitlement to them by clear and convincing evidence, the standard Florida sets by statute. “The standard that we proved to this jury was a punitive damages standard,” Florin said afterward. The trial team connected the financial motive, the threatened divorce, the revised estate plan, the timing, the missing surveillance drive and Stragaj’s conduct into an evidentiary account the jury could test against the defense, which was, through Rebecca’s lawyer Rohom Khonsari, that there was no evidence the doctor wanted a divorce and no physical evidence linking her to the crime.

On March 4, 2025, the jury found that Rebecca Schwartz had “unlawfully and intentionally killed, or participated in procuring the death” of her husband, the words Florida’s probate code uses for the person who forfeits every benefit of a victim’s will, and awarded his children $199,071,904, nearly $200 million. It is one of the largest contested wrongful-death verdicts ever returned in the nation, and it answered, under the rules of evidence, a question that had gone unresolved for more than a decade. “They finally feel like they got some justice,” Florin said of the children. Cummings said they wanted their stepmother held accountable and that the verdict was a step toward the community recognizing that she had killed their father. The team itself put the collectable amount at a fraction of the figure, perhaps ten to twenty million dollars: Rebecca had testified the year before that she was worth $10,000 and had moved almost everything she owned into trusts controlled by her two sons, and the lawyers had by autumn frozen roughly $6 million to $10 million of assets she had placed in hard-to-trace limited liability companies. She had spent more than $5 million on her own lawyers.

After March 4, 2025

The Sheriff’s Office officially closed its investigation weeks after the verdict. Diebel, who had carried it for years, told Dateline, “It’s like the one case where you didn’t get the suspect that you knew in your heart that she committed a murder. You just didn’t have enough for the state attorney’s office to go forward with prosecution.” He said he was glad the civil judgment had given the family some measure of justice, hoped new evidence might one day revive the criminal case, and asked anyone who knew anything, however small, to come forward. State Attorney Bartlett, for his part, said the case would remain open. NBC’s Dateline aired The Death of Dr. Schwartz on October 31, 2025, with Florin and Roebig among those interviewed, seven months after the verdict and eight years after 48 Hours. The Schwartz judgment pushed Florin|Roebig’s cumulative results past $1 billion, and for the fourth time in eleven years, after 2014, 2016 and 2023, one of the firm’s verdicts ranked among the fifty largest in the country.

Ninety Days Before January 25, 2012

On January 25, 2012, a woman in her thirties went to Essentials Massage and Facial of New Tampa in Wesley Chapel for treatment of an earlier neck injury. The business assigned her to Raul A. Delarosa, a massage therapist licensed by the Florida Department of Health. After she had undressed and been covered with a blanket on the table, he sexually assaulted her. Delarosa pleaded to criminal charges the next year, agreed to ten years of probation and the loss of his state license, and became a registered sex offender. In 2014 Roebig and Wil Florin represented the woman, identified at trial as Jane Doe, in Pasco County. She had been in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder since the assault, and she brought the case, her lawyers said, so that it would not happen to other women.

Against Delarosa the case was obvious. The harder and more consequential case was against the business, which had supplied the room, the schedule, the materials and the protocols. Essentials Massage argued, and its insurer argued throughout the litigation, that Delarosa was an independent contractor because the state had licensed him, so that his conduct was his own and a classification problem rather than a corporate one. Florida law looks past the label to the economic reality of who controlled the work, and Roebig presented evidence concerning control of the schedule, the work setting, the supplies, the operating procedures, supervision and retention. The jury found that Delarosa was the company’s employee under the working arrangement proved at trial.

The evidence also addressed notice. Under Garcia v. Duffy, decided by Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal on July 30, 1986, an employer that becomes aware, or should become aware, of an employee’s unfitness during his employment and takes no further action, by investigation, discharge or reassignment, is liable for negligent retention. Approximately ninety days before the assault, the business knew or should have known that Delarosa had wrongfully touched another female patron at the same location, and it nevertheless kept him on the schedule. Trial testimony showed that it had never run a background check on him; he had been fired from three previous jobs. That ninety-day window moved the jury’s attention from a single actor to an enterprise that had seen the warning and kept him working, and the jury found the company negligent in retaining him.

After a four-day trial in Dade City and two hours of deliberation, a Pasco County jury of four women and two men returned a $47.4 million verdict: $420,000 for past and future medical expenses, $12 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering against the business and the therapist, and $35 million in punitive damages against Delarosa for his intentional conduct. The allocation separated reimbursement for medical expense, compensation for personal injury and punishment for intentional conduct, identified which defendants were answerable for each component, and connected the judgment to the evidence, the instructions and the liability findings in that action, a verdict form that let the jurors say precisely what they had decided and why. The business carried a substantial liability policy that covered much of the award, and the firm set out to collect from it. The verdict remains the largest contested jury verdict in Pasco County history and was the second-largest verdict reported in Florida that year; the National Law Journal placed it forty-fourth among the hundred largest jury awards in the country for 2014.

In 2024, a decade after Jane Doe’s case, Roebig tried another Pasco County action against a day-spa corporation arising from an assault by a massage therapist it had retained. That action required its own hiring records, supervision proof, premises-control evidence, notice record, survivor testimony and proof of the relationship between the business and the individual actor. The jury returned an $8 million verdict. The two actions involved different businesses, therapists, evidence, damages records and jury findings, and each client’s proof had to stand on its own.

A Pitcher of Beer on Broad Street

In 2012 Patrick Osmond, then twenty, and a group of friends aged sixteen to twenty were served a pitcher of beer by a bartender at the Applebee’s in Brooksville; the bartender, Fallon Greenwald, was later arrested for the sale. Joseph Raub, the underage driver, drank a mug of it before the group left in his pickup, and less than a mile from the restaurant, on Broad Street, he ran the truck into a palm tree. His blood-alcohol level was .04. Osmond, riding unrestrained in the bed, was thrown from the truck and severed his spinal cord. He spent months in intensive care and rehabilitation and was left an incomplete quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down, living in his parents’ renovated carport. He had been an active high-school graduate who once hoped for a military career. “You go from being able to do everything, to not being able to do anything,” he said.

Florida’s dram-shop statute shields a seller of alcohol from liability for an adult patron’s intoxication, with two exceptions, and one of them is the seller who willfully and unlawfully serves someone under the lawful drinking age. Dram-shop litigation also presents a trap that has swallowed many plaintiffs’ lawyers: the injured person’s own conduct does not vanish from the analysis, Florida’s pure comparative-fault system asks jurors to assign percentages of blame to everyone involved, and the defense makes certain the jury never forgets the plaintiff’s share. Applebee’s pressed every point of the young men’s recklessness, the underage drinking, the impaired driver and the choice to ride in an open truck bed, and maintained that it had met its obligations that night: “We take very seriously the responsibility that comes with serving alcohol. We believe we fulfilled that obligation the evening of this accident.” Roebig did not try to erase any of it. He acknowledged the teenagers’ decisions and turned the jury to the one adult institution in the chain, the license holder whose statutory duties exist because young people make bad decisions.

Roebig represented Osmond in 2016, in a two-week trial in Hernando County, with Florin, Shaun Cummings, John Hart and Frank Miller of Caglianone & Miller. He presented the licensed seller’s age-verification process, its corporate training, its service practices, the chronology of consumption, the collision evidence and the medical and economic cost of permanent paralysis, the full arc from the first drink served to the last dollar of lifetime care. Miller won the argument that evidence of earlier underage service at the same restaurant was admissible, and the jury heard that underage patrons had been served there about seventy times before. Cummings cross-examined the bartender who had poured the pitcher. Applebee’s called a prominent toxicologist who testified that Raub could never have been impaired by one glass of beer; Roebig’s cross-examination brought out that impairment “can and does begin to be very dangerous at the lowest levels of the blood alcohol scale.”

The jury assessed $41,956,474 in total damages for Osmond’s suffering, lost wages and disability, resting on the evidence of lifetime medical care, lost earning capacity and noneconomic loss. It allocated fault forty percent to the driver, forty percent to Osmond himself and twenty percent to Applebee’s, so that the licensed seller’s direct liability came to more than $8.3 million, roughly $8.4 million; the driver’s limited insurance meant his share would likely go uncollected, and Osmond accepted responsibility for his own. It was the largest contested jury verdict in Hernando County history and the largest injury verdict in Florida that year, and the National Law Journal placed it forty-second among the hundred largest in the country for 2016. A conservative jury, squarely presented with the plaintiff’s own fault, had still assigned substantial responsibility to the business whose failures set the night in motion. Florin called the result a message to other establishments to follow the law that protects young people: “It’s time you stop serving underage patrons, because when you do, bad things happen.” Osmond planned a wheelchair-accessible home, a new chair, therapy and college to study audio engineering. “I hope other corporations learn from this,” he said, “and won’t serve anyone underage.”

County Road 48 and a Drained Spa Pool

Around the landmark results runs a steadier line across some of Florida’s most skeptical venues. In 2005 Roebig won a $15 million verdict in a commercial trucking-negligence case arising from a fatal motorcycle crash, the fourth-largest verdict reported in the state that year, and the third time he and Florin had obtained one of Florida’s four largest verdicts of a year. The trucking matter required federal motor-carrier rules, carrier and driver records, logbook auditing, vehicle and scene evidence and accident reconstruction to be joined into a coherent liability account. On October 23, 2017, Roebig and Cummings also won a verdict in a personal-injury case arising from a fatal wrong-way collision on Interstate 275.

Cynthia Underwood was riding her motorcycle on County Road 48 near Bushnell, in Sumter County, when a car struck her; her injuries required extensive surgery, including the amputation of her left leg. Roebig tried the liability phase with Frank Miller in 2016, and the jury found the driver negligent. The damages trial followed, and late on August 24, 2017, a Sumter County jury returned $6,132,642 for Cindy and Steve Underwood, believed to be the largest jury verdict in the county’s history; the team by then was Florin, Roebig, Miller, Taylor Roebig and John Hart. The motorcycle matter required medical causation, future-loss evidence, witness preparation and a jury’s allocation of responsibility, and each of these actions called for its own experts, exhibits, witness sequence, jury instructions and damages presentation.

Ehab Mina, a forty-four-year-old boat builder, used the hot tub at the Boca Ciega Resort & Marina Condominium in St. Petersburg one afternoon in 2008 and came back several hours later, after dark, when management had partially drained it; there was no posted warning, no rope and no evening lighting, his lawyers said. He lost his balance stepping in and injured his right shoulder and spine. Several back surgeries followed, and he had to sell his boat-building business. The association’s lawyers argued that “the half-empty hot tub was an obvious condition.” A first jury found the association and its management company, Condos by Sirata, Inc., equally at fault, fifty percent each. In January 2018, after a seven-day trial at the Clearwater courthouse and more than eleven hours of deliberation, a second Pinellas County jury of three men and three women set damages at $7,556,438, the largest dangerous-condition verdict in Florida that year and one of the largest in the Clearwater courthouse’s history. Roebig tried it with Wil Florin, Taylor Roebig and Chad Florin.

His trial practice also includes negligent-security, product, medical-negligence and other catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death claims, and the partnership’s work has reached beyond injury cases. When Stetson inducted Florin into its Hall of Fame in 2018, it credited the two partners together with record-setting Tampa Bay jury verdicts and with representing the wrestler Hulk Hogan and the former University of South Florida football coach Jim Leavitt. Leavitt sued the university and its athletic foundation in March 2010 for the more than $9 million left on his contract after his firing for cause; Hogan, as Terry Bollea, sued Wells Fargo Southeast that April, alleging that his insurance broker had never told him he needed excess liability coverage before his son Nick’s 2007 street-racing crash in Clearwater left him paying the medical bills of the passenger, John Graziano, beyond his $250,000 policy limits. Florin was the partner who spoke for both clients.

Dana Scholar, Class of 1986

Roebig was born and raised in Jacksonville. He took his undergraduate degree at Florida State University and his Juris Doctor in 1986 from Stetson University College of Law, where he was a Dana Scholar and a member of the National Moot Court Team. After graduation he joined Wil Florin, a fellow Stetson graduate who had founded the firm in Clearwater the previous year and who, at thirty, had won what was then the largest reported jury verdict in Pinellas County history; Roebig co-founded the firm’s trial practice with him, and the partnership has now lasted four decades. He was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1987, to the Middle District of Florida in 1988 and to the District of Colorado in 2016.

He holds three board certifications, and the distinctions among them are instructive. The Florida Bar certified him in Civil Trial Law in 1993 and the National Board of Trial Advocacy in 1995, credentials that demand verified trials to verdict as lead counsel, peer review, judicial references and examination. In 2012 he added a third and rarer one, national certification as a Civil Pretrial Practice Advocate from the National Board of Legal Specialty Certifications. Each requires verified experience, peer and judicial review and examination of a distinct discipline, and together they place his preparation of civil cases within both the pretrial and courtroom phases of board-certified practice. Civil litigation is overwhelmingly decided before a jury is seated, through investigation, expert development, depositions, motion practice and the narrowing of what remains genuinely in dispute, and Roebig’s public verdicts rest on that pretrial record: the ninety-day notice window in Pasco, the seventy prior underage sales in Hernando, the deposition video in Pinellas.

The work is also taught. Roebig lectures at Stetson on negligence and wrongful-death damages, has served as an adjunct professor of civil law at St. Petersburg College, and speaks on trial tactics for the Florida Justice Association and other trial-lawyer seminars; those commitments connect his trial practice to recurring instruction in witness preparation, damages proof, negligence doctrine and appellate presentation. The firm’s connection to legal education has a physical address. The Florin|Roebig Courtroom on Stetson’s Gulfport campus, funded and built by the firm in 1993, was renovated in the summer of 2006 at the firm’s expense, with a technology upgrade and flat-panel displays in the gallery designed from student and faculty focus groups, and re-dedicated on April 19, 2007; it is among the largest and most technologically advanced teaching courtrooms in the country, used by Stetson’s trial teams and by Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal for oral argument. “Wil Florin and Tommy Roebig have given a wonderful gift to Stetson College of Law that will be used to help educate law students with the latest courtroom technology well into the next decade,” Dean Darby Dickerson said at the re-dedication. Florin and Roebig dedicated the gift to Professor Robert Bickel, whose summer civil-rights course takes students by bus to the movement’s landmarks in the South and whose travel the firm has continued to fund. “Students need to meet history if they are to understand civil rights,” Bickel said.

In 2007 the Stetson Lawyers Alumni Association honored Roebig and Florin with its Paul May Meritorious Service Award, its outstanding-alumni award. On October 26, 2019, a year after Florin’s own induction, Stetson inducted Roebig into the College of Law Hall of Fame alongside Susan S. Demers and Judge Michelle T. Morley, the eighty-ninth inductee in the school’s then-119-year history; Stetson is Florida’s first law school, and the Hall, which welcomed its first inductees in 2004, Charles A. and Eleanor N. Dana among them, honors alumni who have reached and remained at the pinnacle of their fields. Roebig gave the acceptance speech that evening.

777 Alderman Road

Roebig practices with Florin|Roebig at 777 Alderman Road in Palm Harbor, the firm he has helped lead since joining it in its second year. He leads its general-negligence group; Florin leads medical malpractice, Taylor Roebig employment, Neil O’Brien and Luca Esposito construction negligence, and Chad Florin and Hal S. Weitzenfeld first-party insurance. From a single Clearwater office the firm has grown into a multi-state litigation practice, adding employment-discrimination claims in 1991 and construction-negligence and first-party property-insurance claims in 2015, and widening its practice groups beyond injury and wrongful death into labor and employment, entertainment and new media, and construction litigation. Its headquarters sits on a 6.2-acre lakeside campus in North Pinellas County, anchored by a 15,000-square-foot trial and litigation facility that Florin and Roebig bought in 1998, with a model courtroom and an on-site exhibit-production center. It has offices in Jacksonville, Boca Raton, Key West and Palm Beach Gardens, consultation offices in Fort Myers and West Palm Beach, and operations in Denver since 2016, in Dallas and Houston since 2017, and in Minneapolis, where its Bloomington office opened in 2014 and where it ranks among the largest plaintiffs’ personal-injury practices in Minnesota. The firm keeps a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air turboprop as an evidentiary instrument, putting investigators at a catastrophic accident scene, in a city or in the countryside, before the proof can degrade or the defense can shape the account.

He has tried cases in Pasco, Hernando, Sumter, Pinellas and other Florida venues, adapting to each court’s procedures, jury pool, witnesses and physical evidence. His work runs from factual investigation, scene preservation and the governing records through expert selection and preparation, depositions, motion practice, jury presentation, verdict forms and post-trial proceedings. Across premises, liquor-liability, trucking, product, catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death matters, his teams connect physical evidence to governing duties, prepare treating and fact witnesses, and translate the medical and economic proof for the particular injury. They build each record through investigation, expert work, depositions and motion practice before presenting it to a jury, and they build verdict forms that give jurors a clear path from breach to damages while adapting the record to the client, the defendant and the governing law in each action.

More than a billion dollars in recoveries later, the firm took the Schwartz case through a full jury trial rather than settling it. Roebig’s civil trial practice now spans four decades on behalf of injured people and families in Florida, a body of verdicts that has repeatedly reset what juries in the state’s most conservative venues will award when the proof supports it. His juries were looking, all the way to the verdict form, at Jane Doe, at Patrick Osmond, and at three children who had waited more than a decade for someone to say plainly what had happened to their father.