Complaint Review: Florida Cannabis Council - Stuart, FL 34994 Florida

1. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.3(a) by failing to keep us fully informed about developments on our small claims case.  Mr. Minardi attended a small claims hearing via phone but didn’t provide any status update from that hearing in which we were requested to provide a FACT sheet. This failure caused us to be in contempt of court.

2. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.12(a) by refusing to listen to us during our criminal and small claims case. Mr. Minardi failed to timely contact FBI agent, David Brown, see email dated 11/17/16 (See Exhibit B).  We asked Mr. Minardi to associate our criminal cases with Tom Cushman on different occasions and he refused and made excuses to bring Sean Gearhart on to our case.  Mr. Cushman was in the county that we were charged and Mr. Gearhart was 3.5 hrs. away and billed for full price to drive to hearings.  We asked Mr. Minardi to associate our civil case with Brian Demaggio in Jacksonville to move forward with our cases and he did not contact him until Mrs. Yandell confronted him and forced him to make the association.  He in turn sent an unprofessional email to Mr. Demaggio in the middle of the night instead of being part of a professional legal team. Mr. Demaggio has since decided not to assist us with our pending civil actions in part due to Mr. Minardi’s unprofessional behavior and issues with our case and the way it was handled.

3. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.5 by charging excessive and unnecessary fees. He has refused to provide us detailed billing of his hours.  His previous Employer, Kelly Kronenberg, has no history of his hours associated with the $11,500.00 that was paid to the firm when we initially hired him to represent us.  Instead, Mr. Minardi claims that we owe in excess of 17k for services rendered which we have disputed in a letter dated 6/9/2016, in which his only response was to cease all communications with him. Mr. Minardi also failed to turn over his research that we were billed for, and our entire case file remains in his possession. Due to Mr. Minardi’s cease and desist, we sought guidance from Mr. Leon at The Florida Bar on how to proceed.

4. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.3(Diligence).  Mr. Minardi attended many out of town Cannabis industry events between May 1 2015 and April 2016 with his association with Regulate Florida and the Cannamoms organization which prevented him from being diligent on our cases. He went weeks without returning emails or phone calls, had little or no office staff on a consistent basis. He also missed a hearing for our criminal case on 11/19/2016, but billed us for 6.2 hours on that date (See exhibit E). Mr. Minardi repeatedly missed or was delinquent to every conference call we ever had with him except the very last one. He also missed a conference call with the FBI, in association to the corruption in St. John’s County as told by his assistant at the time, Gisa Mouradian. It took him over 2 months to make contact with the FBI after he was told to contact them ASAP.

 5 Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.7 (conflict of interest).  By Mr. Minardi being romantically and professionally linked with Moriah Barnhart, who is knowingly breaking Federal and Florida State Law.  Ms. Barnhart was mentioned as a key witness during our very first meeting at Kelly Kronenberg with Seth and Mr. Minardi. Information supported by emails dated 5/1/2015 to Mr. Minardi at Kelley Kronenberg highlighting Ms. Barnhart in several of the bullets. In our opinion, Mr. Minardi failed to involve Ms. Barnhart due to a clear conflict of personal interest.  See email from 5/1/2015 stating the reasons we thought MMJ was legal in Florida.

6. In the fall of 2015, I contacted Mr. Minardi’s previous employer, Kelly Kronenberg, in an attempt to seek new council for our criminal case due to Mr. Minardi’s repeated communication failures and his inability to complete many open items that we had been tracking. Their response to me was “Minardi went Rogue”. 

  7. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.6 by making false statements to both the Florida Bar investigator, Mr. Leon and to several attorney’s that are working our civil and nursing license defense case. He has attempted to damage our reputation to our new council by telling them we owed him over $17,000 and refusing to provide the requested documentation to Mr. Greenberg. Mr. Minardi also disclosed to the bar that we “smoke pot”. We are both medical patients in Oregon under the OMMP program, we did not authorize or give permission for Mr. Minardi to disclose our medical information to Mr. Leon, nor did we authorize him to discuss any aspects of our criminal case with him. We feel this is a violation of attorney client privilege. (See exhibit C).  Mr. Minardi failed to provide the following items as requested by Mr. Leon and ourselves. A) All detailed billing for the Yandell’s cases April 2015 thru May 2016 B) Copies of all research completed that was billed for C) Documents given to Mr. Minardi from HLS that we personally paid for.  After our criminal case and prior to signing a new contract for the civil cases, we asked Mr. Minardi for his federal and civil case experience.  Instead of offering the information, Mr. Minardi became defensive and refused to provide the information.  Due to his refusal we were unable to validate if Mr. Minardi is even qualified to handle the multiple cases that were set forth. It was after this time that we terminated our relationship with Mr. Minardi. (See Exhibit H)  Mr. Minardi failed to act in our best interest by not associating our case with a firm that had the experience necessary.  Instead he supplemented our legal team with a much less experienced attorney.

8. Mr. Minardi did not have malpractice insurance but speaks poorly of our previous attorney, Mr. Christensen for not having the same insurance. By making these statements, it gave us a false sense of security that he would have this coverage.   We have been unable to ascertain as to whether he had any coverage while at his previous employer that we initially hired for services. We feel that it is reckless in nature to practice in such a profession without the proper safeguards for all parties.

9. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to the Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.6.4 Law Reform activities affecting client interest. By working with both the Cannamoms and Regulate Florida, Mr. Minardi has put himself in a position of potentially changing Florida cannabis laws, while at the same time defending cannabis cases while groups he chairs break federal and state laws.

10. Mr. Minardi claims that based on his research that you are required to provide six months’ notice of intent to sue on Federal cases for City and other state law protected entities, this has been confirmed as incorrect by several Federal/Civil attorneys.

11. Mr. Minardi made a statement to Mr. Leon at the Florida bar that we were not upset until he wouldn’t work our civil case for free, that is simply not true. We had been upset with Mr. Minardi’s handling of our case for many months but he continued to drain our bank account which prevented us from going to trial or having the ability to hire another attorney. The final straw was when we found out that he had been romantically involved with Ms. Barnhart for the majority of our time of representation.  Mr. Minardi refused to involve Ms. Barnhart or the other Cannamoms that had interaction with the same police that arrested us. In our opinion this is a conflict of interest as we had discussed sensitive information surrounding Ms. Barnhart and the Cannamoms as part of our criminal defense. He did nothing but string us along for months while doing no work and promising it would be completed the next week.

12.  During our case we spoke with Mr. Minardi regarding the Cannamoms illegal activity and he dismissed our concerns and never offered any information in our defense. Cannamom's are still permitted to use the medicine we were arrested for.

13. Mr. Minardi was forced to bring his child to court due to his inability to manage his schedule, his poor performance and unfocused nature was less than professional representation for our case. Mr. Minardi had many months to prepare for the trial but was unprepared during trial, he was forced to bring in a 2^nd year attorney with little or no experience to assist him. Mr. Minardi also attempted to file an extension on the Trial date of 11/20/15 two days before on the 18th which was denied by the court. Mr. Minardi was delinquent in filing motions attempting to involve the police for damages that the Judge dismissed due to his untimely filings. Mr. Minardi also failed to provide us with legal documents (FACT information sheet) after the final decision against us was made.  In fact we had to ask him weeks later what the outcome was and he never mentioned that additional paperwork was to be completed and returned, also see St Johns Court small claims case SC15-0386

14. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional conduct 4.1.1 Competence in the following areas Knowledge, preparation, and thoroughness. Mr. Minardi instructed us not to file bar complaints against HLS with DOH/BAR until after our plea stating that it wouldn’t do any good. Subsequently in March Mr. Minardi instructed us to file the BAR complaints in which probable cause was found. This could have impacted our criminal case.  The department of health has open and active investigations into Health Law and Florida Integrative Health. (See Fl. Supreme Court case SC16-1081)

15. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.3 Diligence, by procrastinating in the following areas of our case. A) Mr. Minardi failed to contact the FBI in regards to corruption investigation that I had instructed him to do. After 60 days and missed conference calls he finally spoke to the agent but never forwarded any of the requested information. B) He delayed the viewing of the evidence for many months. This caused our motion to reweigh to hold little or no substance in court. C) He failed to invoke the witnesses that we requested him to. D) Failed to file a Declaratory Judgement with our criminal case which would have forced the courts to rule on the medical necessity which was at the center of our case. This also should have been filed with the board of nursing and Florida Dept. of Health. He stated several times that the document was ready to be filed but refused to file it.  E) We requested contracts for the civil cases to review in Feb 2016 but never received anything until April 2016. F) Mr. Minardi failed to follow up on our firearms as part of the personal property we received back, Mr. Minardi never followed up on the order for the firearms leaving us in a bind to find another provider for storage. G) Mr. Minardi failed to contact 4 different TV/Media contacts that were interested in covering our story. H) Mr. Minardi failed to keep his schedule as it related to our property return and left Marsha to deal with the Police by herself as Mr. Minardi was too busy doing Cannamoms/Regulate Florida business.   (Additional information is available upon request)

16. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.4 Communication A) Mr. Minardi had little or part time staff during much of our case, he also has no office for customer meetings. B) His failure to provide a real email service has caused many of our emails to be returned due to his Gmail email account being full on multiple occasions. C) Mr. Minardi treated us very poorly and replied to text messages with repeated offensive remarks like “Why the f**k would I do that” and “why the hell do I care? The bar, the DEA everyone knows about them, they obviously don’t care”, was generally hostile when we asked him for any details or tried to question him on prior commitments he made, he also admitted to being overwhelmed numerous times. He made dozens of commitments that went unmet during the time of our relationship, it got so bad that I was forced to create an OAI (open action item) tracking sheet, which did little to improve his follow through.  (Additional information is available upon request)

17. Mr. Minardi has failed to adhere to the Florida Bar Rules of Professional Conduct 4.1.5(a) by charging excessive fees. A) Mr. Minardi claimed to be a cannabis law expert in Florida, however the time spent researching doesn’t align with an expert in this area. B) Mr. Minardi had us hire his experts that charged excessive fees and produced a sub-par work product in which we were double charged to fix (IE Bruce Vannaman). C) Mr. Minardi continues to hold our case file hostage as part of a $17,000.00 bill he has provided with limited, inconsistent details while offering us nothing but a cease and desist notice instead of trying to work this out.  After our calculations on the case files, it would appear that Mr. Minardi worked a total of 85.45 hours on our case but attempted to bill us for an additional 36.4 hours for items that are inconsistent (excess charges during driving time, double charging while driving and talking to us on the phone, charging to work on his experts paperwork, charging for office meetings and/or instructions to  his staff, excess charges for reading emails during his travel with Cannamoms all across the US). We paid Mr. Minardi a total of $23,500.00 in payments and he exhausted hours totaling 85.45 at $275.00 per hour for a grand total of $23,126.25, this does not take into account the associate time that lacks any billing details.   D) after reviewing summary billing details, we have been charged for Mr. Minardi to eat two meals and attend a 30 minute court session and a 1 hour meeting after, and then double billed us for client time while charging us $275.00 per hour to drive 465 miles round trip after his 5/7/16 court appearance. Mr. Minardi failed to provide a final detailed billing statement.  E) Mr. Minardi charged us for two hotel nights totaling $195.80 on 10/25 thru 10/27, according to our deposition email records he only stayed one night, another example of inconsistent billing. It appears Mr. Minardi stayed in a hotel on 10/26 and also charged for 6 hours of drive time which is another inconsistency in the billing.  We had been making substantial monthly payments to Mr. Minardi and never agreed to paying the balance in full before working the civil/federal lawsuits, F) Mr. Minardi has failed to produce any of the “research” that was billed to our account.