One lawyer, accountable for your case.

Who handles your case

David M. Greene is a trial attorney licensed in Florida, Florida Bar No. 89805. He represents homeowners, community associations, and people injured by unsafe or defective construction. Construction-defect litigation is the core of the practice, and it extends to homeowners insurance and bad-faith claims, construction-related injury and wrongful death, condominium and HOA representation, and construction and business contract disputes.

It is a statewide Florida practice, based in Tampa. On the construction side it handles single-family home defects of every kind — production-built tract homes, spec homes, and custom luxury construction alike. The build type changes the evidence and the parties; it does not change the analysis.

You get one place to turn and one lawyer accountable to you from the first call through resolution. You are not bounced between strangers, and you are not left managing your own case.

What these cases actually take

Construction cases are paper cases before they are courtroom cases: permits, inspection reports, code-violation records, engineering and cost-of-repair reports, the other side’s document production, and years of correspondence with a builder or an insurer. The facts that decide the case are usually sitting somewhere in that stack.

They also run on a statutory track. A Florida construction-defect claim usually begins with written pre-suit notice of the claimed defects under Chapter 558, an opportunity for the builder to inspect, and a window to respond or offer repairs before a lawsuit can be filed. Many claims resolve or narrow at that stage; those that do not proceed to litigation or, where the purchase agreement requires it, to binding arbitration. Property-insurance claims run on their own clocks — a reporting deadline, a supplemental-claim deadline, and written notice to the insurer before suit.

Much of the work is establishing who is answerable for what. A builder who holds the permit for a home generally bears a non-delegable duty to supervise its construction properly, including the work of subcontractors — so a builder often cannot avoid responsibility for defective work simply because a subcontractor performed it. Showing that takes the permit file, the inspection history, and the contracts, not an assertion.

And the evidence is largely expert evidence. Engineers and cost-of-repair experts document the defects and establish the scope and likely cause, and that work is developed and tested throughout the matter rather than assembled at the end.

Dates come out of documents, not memory

Time limits are strict and the trigger dates are not the obvious ones. Current Florida law generally allows seven years to bring a construction-defect claim, running from the earliest of a few construction milestones — a temporary certificate of occupancy, the certificate of occupancy, or a certificate of completion. A property-insurance claim generally must be reported within one year of the date of loss, with any supplemental claim within eighteen months. These dates can be more favorable than homeowners assume, so do not assume you are too late to find out.

Because of that, the first thing that happens to a new file is that its dates are established from the documents themselves: the certificate of occupancy rather than the closing date, the day a notice was actually served rather than the day everyone assumed.

The tools the office uses

The firm writes and maintains its own local AI stack. It runs on equipment the office owns and controls, and it is built and maintained in-house — the lawyer who handles the case wrote the tools and keeps them working. It is used for the bulk work: reading and sorting large volumes of data, permits, plans, and document productions, and working on confidential client material.

The firm also uses secure cloud APIs to frontier-level models. When David works through a legal question with an outside model — thinking through a motion, testing an argument — that material is handled by the provider under its terms, the same as email, court e-filing and online legal research. That use is governed by a strict data confidentiality agreement: material sent for strategy assistance is not retained by the provider and is not used to train its models. He decides what goes there and what does not.

The software reads. The attorney decides. These tools sort, search and read documents. They do not choose a strategy, decide what a document means, or speak for you. Every pleading, every demand, every brief is David’s own work, reviewed and signed by him.

And nothing is taken on the software’s word. When a tool reports what it found — a date, a name, who filed what — that answer is checked against a second, independent method before anyone relies on it. Where the two disagree, the disagreement goes on a list for a person to look at.

When a case calls for more than one lawyer

Most matters are handled here, start to finish. When a case benefits from a particular specialty, or from counsel on the ground in another part of the state, the firm brings in trusted colleagues and stays in the lead, so you are never managing a roster of lawyers yourself. David remains your lead advocate and stays responsible for your representation, and you are kept informed. Any fee division is disclosed to you in writing, requires your consent, and never increases your total fee.

What the first conversation looks like

You bring the problem and tell us, at a high level, who you are and what is going on. One conversation, no runaround, no obligation. We run a conflicts check before discussing the facts of your matter, and if it is a fit, the work starts from there.

Related: About David M. Greene  ·  Insights