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Trials & Litigation

Blank Rome tried to exact financial ruin because lawyer switched sides in airline litigation, her suit alleges

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 6, 2024, 12:00 pm CST

A lawyer in Dunnellon, Florida, has filed a lawsuit alleging that attorneys at Blank Rome filed an “utterly baseless” suit against her in a bid to exact financial ruin, destroy her reputation and send a warning to lawyers who switch sides in litigation involving its aviation clients.

The amended suit by civil-trial lawyer Veronica Turner says Blank Rome lawyers engaged in a “retaliatory charade” when they alleged that she breached her fiduciary duty to their clients.

Law360 covered the Feb. 29 amended suit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Law.com covered the Feb. 19 initial complaint in an earlier story.

The amended suit says Turner once defended Lycoming Engines, a division of the Avco Corp.—a manufacturer of piston aircraft engines—in aviation crash cases. When Turner ended her representation of the companies, her aviation cases and files were transferred to Blank Rome, which picked up the representation of Lycoming Engines and the Avco Corp.

Several years after that work ended, Turner accepted an assignment from a plaintiffs’ aviation litigation law firm. The work involved responses to evidence motions in litigation that did not involve or implicate the Avco Corp., the suit says. The Avco Corp. had initially been a defendant in the case, but the company was dismissed on personal-jurisdiction grounds.

Blank Rome sued Turner on behalf the Avco Corp. parent company Textron Inc. in August 2020, falsely asserting that she used information that gleaned in her representation of the Avco Corp. in representing plaintiffs against it. The suit was “based entirely upon an absurd, nonsensical and fabricated factual predicate,” Turner’s amended suit says.

“Defendants’ case against Ms. Turner was illegitimate from the day it was filed, was nothing more than an ill-conceived ‘hit job,’ and was intended from its inception to damage and destroy Ms. Turner personally and professionally,” Turner’s suit says.

Turner’s suit alleges wrongful use of civil proceedings, civil conspiracy and loss of consortium by Turner’s husband.

The initial defendants in Turner’s suit included Blank Rome and three of its lawyers. The amended suit names the lawyers but not Blank Rome as defendants. Other defendants are the Avco Corp. and Textron Inc.

Blank Rome did not reply to requests for comment by Law360 and Law.com. Blank Rome and the three lawyer defendants did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment by the ABA Journal.