Miami Sheriff Hired a Private Law Firm To Pursue—and Profit From—Asset Forfeiture Cases
A court challenge to an unusual agreement between the Miami-Dade sheriff and a law firm will set Florida law on whether police can pay private lawyers on contingency to litigate civil asset forfeiture cases.
A court appeal challenging the Miami-Dade County sheriff's unusual practice of using a private law firm to pursue property seizures on its behalf—and guaranteeing the firm a cut of the proceeds—could change the law surrounding police seizures in Florida and is drawing national attention from think tanks and criminal defense groups.
The appeal, brought by a group of Miami-area mobile phone distributors and retailers who had tens of millions of dollars seized by the Miami-Dade County Sheriff's Office (MDSO) last year, is the first time Florida state courts have considered whether police departments can pay private law firms on a contingency basis to represent them in civil asset forfeiture cases.
Under civil forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even when the owner hasn't been charged with a crime. Several states effectively abolished civil forfeiture in recent years after decades of complaints from civil liberties groups that property owners lacked due process protections.
The electronics businesses allege the MDSO violated their due process rights when it hired a private law firm to pursue civil forfeiture cases against them, and they're asking a state appeals court, in a brief filed in October, to recognize that it's unconstitutional to be "prosecuted by counsel who stands to profit immensely from whatever property counsel succeeds in forfeiting."
"The public interest pays the price when the sheriff puts forfeiture prosecutions on commission, paying a lawyer a cut of every dollar forfeited," Lisandra Guerrero, one of the attorneys for the businesses, told The Miami Herald.
The MDSO argued in court that it maintains oversight of which cases to file and settle, but a variety of interest groups have also submitted amicus briefs in the case arguing that this sort of bounty arrangement violates a bedrock legal principle of evenhandedness and neutrality that is supposed to ethically bind judges and prosecutors.
"The problem is that it incentivizes a private attorney to create litigation, not to go after those who have done the worst crimes, but those who have the deepest pocketbooks or who are most vulnerable to having their property taken," says Tim Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, a free market think tank that filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Miami businesses challenging the practice.
The dispute started last August, when the MDSO seized $45 million from 16 Miami-area mobile phone businesses and froze their bank accounts. The majority of that money, $42.7 million, belonged to SH Americas, which claims in court filings to be the largest authorized distributor of Samsung devices in South Florida. The seizures were part of a sprawling investigation into an alleged money laundering scheme run by two Chinese nationals. However, those forfeiture cases weren't handled by the MDSO's legal counsel or the state attorney's office, but instead by the Coral Gables law firm of Israel Reyes, a former police detective, prosecutor, and judge. (In January of 2025, Reyes swore in current Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz.)
In March, a group of the electronics businesses targeted in the MDSO investigation filed a joint motion seeking to disqualify Reyes' firm from their cases. A Miami circuit court judge denied the businesses' motion in April, ruling that the MDSO still exercised enough authority over initiating and settling cases. That decision is currently on appeal at Florida's 3rd District Court, where the claimants are asking the court to recognize that Reyes' direct financial interest in their seized property violates principles of neutrality.
According to court documents, under an agreement with the MDSO signed two months prior to the initiation of the seizures, Reyes would be awarded contingency fees of 20 percent to 30 percent for every successful forfeiture recovery. Those fees increased if the property claimant contested the forfeiture, sought a settlement, or appealed.
The claimants' appeal briefing states that, "On the seized funds alone, Reyes stands to keep between $9 million and $13 million in legal fees." The MDSO is seeking an additional $2.6 billion in yet-unseized revenue from the companies that, according to court documents, would carry a potential $480 million in fees for Reyes' firm.
The Miami Herald reported that although an arrest warrant was issued last year for one of the leaders of the alleged criminal enterprise, Weizhong Zhu, no one at the electronics businesses has been criminally charged.
It's common for public agencies to retain private law firms for various legal matters, but civil forfeiture cases, even though they are held in civil court, are considered quasi-criminal proceedings, since they are initiated by law enforcement and tied to police investigations and testimony. As such, they are typically handled by police departments' in-house legal counsel and prosecutors' offices.
The use of contingency fees in asset forfeiture cases is rare and controversial. Indiana is the only state that relies heavily on private lawyers and contingency fees to prosecute asset forfeiture cases, but the practice is heavily disfavored elsewhere. In 2012, a Georgia appeals court ruled that overt contingency fees violated state public policy and called the practice "repugnant" to the principle that prosecutors should avoid the appearance of financial interest in cases.
In the closest parallel case in Florida, a state court declared it unconstitutional for police to pay informants a contingency fee based on convictions. However, Florida courts have never ruled on the use of contingency fees in civil forfeiture cases, nor is there a direct Supreme Court precedent, meaning the outcome of this case will shape the law in Florida.
That's why several national and state interest groups have filed amicus briefs in the case. The Goldwater Institute's amicus brief argues that the "use of contingency counsel to prosecute forfeitures violates a crucial legal principle of even-handedness and justice," an error that is "especially problematic, given that forfeiture cases are already subject to lax due process standards."
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (FACDL) also filed an amicus brief warning that "the bounty arrangement here ties an attorney's compensation directly to the value of property forfeited—a structure that, regardless of any oversight, creates the type of financial incentive that is incompatible with the prosecutorial function."
The adoption of a contingency fee model, the NACDL and FACDL wrote, "could quickly transform civil forfeiture into an instrument of economic coercion" for small-business owners.
The MDSO and Reyes Law Firm did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
