Florida Bar seeks suspension of Coral Gables attorney accused of fleecing clients
The Florida Bar has urged the state Supreme Court to immediately suspend the law license of Coral Gables attorney Jay Lewis Farrow, accusing him of “causing great public harm” in multiple complaints filed by clients who claim he fleeced them while doing little to no work.
The Florida Bar’s petition for emergency suspension also accuses Farrow of lying to the Supreme Court about his “agreement” with the Bar to dismiss a contempt action brought against him last year while its lawyers pursued more than a dozen misconduct grievances from clients.
The petition, filed last Wednesday, says Farrow “has engaged in blatantly abusive litigation tactics; failed to comply with court orders; charged and received exorbitant fees from clients for which he produced no or minimal work product; and submitted fraudulent filings to the [Supreme] Court in the pending contempt action.”
Farrow was the subject of a Miami Herald story based on interviews with more than a dozen former clients who said that Farrow had deserted them without completing the legal work he promised them.
The story featured a Florida couple who took out a second mortgage on their home in 2023 to pay him $80,000 in legal fees for a lawsuit against the landlord of their go-kart racing track.
St. Petersburg couple Bobbie and Terry Downs said Farrow didn’t file the suit as promised, leading to their complaint against him with the Florida Bar last summer. While they’re happy the Florida Bar has finally taken emergency action against Farrow, Bobbie Downs expressed disappointment 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 School of Law graduate who was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2003, formerly had his office in Coral Gables but now appears to be working in Davie. He could not be reached for comment at his office or on his cell phone. The numbers for both were not functioning. Farrow also did not respond to a query sent by the Herald to two of his email addresses.
A few months after the Herald story was published in November, Farrow, his wife and infant child filed a 267-page lawsuit against dozens of defendants — including other law firms, insurance companies and the newspaper’s parent company, McClatchy Media, and one of its journalists — accusing them of aiding and abetting a cyber-conspiracy against them. Farrow’s case, filed in February, is pending in federal court in Miami.
A critical turning point in the Florida Bar’s case against Farrow occurred in late November when the Bar’s lawyers filed a petition asking the state Supreme Court to find him in contempt, based on his “failure to respond to 13 separate grievances.” The Bar asked the Supreme Court to suspend Farrow until he responded to each of the grievances, but the court did not do so.
On March 18, 2025, Farrow filed documents that claimed he and the Bar agreed to drop the contempt case. Those filings are among the key elements in the Bar’s emergency petition filed last week.
“These pleadings falsely proclaimed an agreement between respondent [Farrow] and the bar to voluntarily dismiss the contempt proceedings that were then pending in this [Supreme] Court,” the Bar’s emergency petition stated.
“The alleged stipulation was clearly suspect, as it contained errors and misspellings, including of the then assigned Bar counsel’s name,” the petition stated. “The pleadings were designed to mislead this Court into believing that the Bar agreed to a dismissal of the contempt action; when, in fact, nothing of the kind had ever occurred.”
The emergency petition, which included affidavits by Bar Counsel Randall L. Berman and investigator John Berrena, asserted that Farrow is “undeterred by orders of the court.”
“He has caused, or is likely to cause, immediate and serious harm to clients, the legal system, or the public, and immediate action must be taken to protect [his] clients and the public,” the petition stated, requesting Farrow’s immediate suspension as a lawyer in Florida.
While other clients of Farrow’s expressed appreciation for the Bar’s emergency action, they, too, questioned why it has taken so long to seek punishment.
Mike Casentini originally hired Farrow in 2021 to represent him in a dispute with movers he had hired for a cross-country move from Sacramento to Raleigh. But three years later, Casentini said that Farrow himself became unreachable, which made it impossible for him to collect the money he was owed from the moving companies.
Casentini filed a Bar complaint against the attorney last year.
“This is a year too late,” Casentini said about the Bar’s emergency petition. “The reign of terror that Jay Farrow is leveraging on victims has continued.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
