Florida urged the state Supreme Court to immediately suspend Coral Gables’ attorney Jay Lewis Farrow, accusing him of “causing major public harm” in multiple complaints filed by clients who claimed he was not at work.
The Florida emergency suspension petition also accused Farrow of lying to the Supreme Court last year about a “consensus” with Barr while his lawyer pursued more than 12 misconduct complaints from his client.
A petition filed last Wednesday states that Farrow “engages in blatantly abusive litigation tactics. He failed to comply with court orders. He filed lawsuits from clients who did not claim or produced minimal work products.
Farrow was the subject of the Miami Herald story based on interviews with more than a dozen former clients who said Farrow had abandoned them without completing the legal work he had promised.
Story featured a Florida couple in 2023 to take out a second mortgage from their home and pay $80,000 in legal fees for a lawsuit against a go-kart racing truck landlord.
St. Petersburg couple Bobby and Terry Downs said Farrow didn’t file a lawsuit as promised, leading to complaints against him at a Florida bar last summer. We are delighted that Florida Bar has finally filed an emergency lawsuit against Farrow, but Bobby Downs is disappointed that it took so long.
“I think it’s a miserably failed system that we have,” she told the Herald on Tuesday.
Farrow, 49, a University of Miami law graduate who was admitted to Florida Bar in 2003, previously had an office at Coral Gables, but now appears to work at Davy. He could not be reached for comment in his office or in his mobile phone. Both numbers were not working. Farrow also did not respond to questions sent by the Herald to two email addresses.
A few months after the Herald story was released in November, Farrow, his wife and toddler filed a 267-page lawsuit against dozens of defendants, including other law firms, insurance companies, newspaper parent company McClatchy Media, and its journalists. The Farrow case filed in February is pending in federal court in Miami.
A significant turning point in Florida Barr’s lawsuit against Farrow occurred in late November when his attorney filed a petition to the state Supreme Court to admit that he was emptied based on his “failure to respond to 13 separate complaints.” Barr asked the Supreme Court to suspend Fallow until he responded to each complaint, but the court did not.
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On March 18, 2025, Farrow filed a document claiming that he and Barr had agreed to remove the light empty case. These applications are one of the key elements of the bar emergency petition filed last week.
“These complaints falsely declare an agreement between the respondent (Farrow) and Barr and voluntarily dismiss the mild empt case that was held up in this (highest) court,” Barr’s emergency petition said.
“The suspicion of the regulations is clearly suspicious as it included errors and spelling errors, including the name of the bar counsel at the time,” the petition said. “The suit was designed to mislead the court to believe that this court agreed to dismiss the light empty case.
An emergency petition, which includes an affidavit by Barr Advisor Randall L. Berman and investigator John Belena, argued that Farrow was “not deterred by court orders.”
“He has caused or is likely to cause immediate and serious harm to the client, the legal system, or the public, or to take immediate action (his) client and the public,” the petition said, demanding an immediate suspension of Farrow as a Florida lawyer.
Other clients at Farrow expressed their gratitude for Barr’s emergency actions, but wondered why it took them so long to seek punishment too.
Mike Casentini originally hired Farrow in 2021 and represented him in a dispute with the engine he hired for a cross-country journey from Sacramento to Raleigh. But three years later, Casentini says Farrow himself became unreachable and it became impossible to collect the money he owed from the moving company.
Casentini filed a lawyer’s complaint last year against his lawyer.
“This is too late,” Casentini said of the bar’s emergency petition. “The terrifying reign of Jay Farrow is taking advantage of his victims continues.”
