Straight Shooter

Lee Gunn drums on his thighs impatiently as he leans back in his chair, waiting for the Zoom mediation session to start. Dressed casually in a sport jacket, white shirt and no tie, he’s sitting in his high-rise office in downtown Tampa, with an expansive view of Hillsborough Bay. He describes the case as an insurance company’s indifference to “a human tragedy.” 

With son Delton—an associate at the Gunn Law Group—sitting nearby, Gunn predicts the session will be a waste of time because the insurer is not ready to make an offer he considers reasonable. Within 45 minutes, the negotiation comes to an impasse and the mediation ends. 

Gunn, 66, has handled plaintiff’s work in insurance bad faith, medical malpractice and catastrophic tort cases for 26 years, most of those at the firm he founded in 2005. For 17 years before that, he handled these types of cases on the defense side. He’s scored multiple multimillion-dollar verdicts and settlements, the largest of them confidential, and become one of the state’s top attorneys to whom plaintiff’s firms refer potential big-dollar cases.

Gunn has so much experience in the field of insurance bad faith that defense lawyers sometimes seek his help on cases he’s not involved in. “When I’ve seen a problem developing with my clients’ insurance coverage, I’ve called Lee,” says Chris Schulte, a Tampa medical malpractice attorney who has defended medical providers sued by Gunn. 

In the Champlain Towers condominium collapse in Surfside in 2021, Gunn worked with Miami attorney Michael Thomas, who says Gunn was instrumental to the resolution of the case. “Lee is extremely knowledgeable on insurance coverage, and he’s very good in protecting clients’ rights under the policies,” Thomas says. “He’s also a great guy and fun to be around.”

Gunn is known for taking on factually and legally challenging cases that other attorneys might turn down as unwinnable—then winning them. In the mid-2000s, he represented a woman whose daughter suffered catastrophic injuries before she was born during an experimental in-utero procedure to remove a rare tumor on her tailbone. Gunn had just three weeks to learn about the complex procedure and file a notice of intent before the statute of limitations expired.

Gunn accused the surgeon of erroneously injecting alcohol into the fetus’ blood system, causing blood clots to form in the heart and leading to severe brain injury and disfigurement.

He persuaded the defendant surgeon’s ex-partner—one of just four experts in the world on the procedure—to provide an affidavit backing the lawsuit. Then, over the ensuing months, he pieced together evidence he believed supported his allegations that the surgeon lied to the woman and her husband about his previous success with the procedure and deceived them in the informed-consent process. 

After two years of litigating the case, not long before the trial was scheduled to start, Gunn caught a stunning break. He received a phone call from Schulte, who was representing the surgeon. Schulte told him that he and his colleague had unexpectedly found audio on the video of the surgery, and played it for Gunn over the phone. 

“When you have the actual voice of the wrongdoer screaming, ‘Oh my God,’ that’s a gotcha moment for a lawyer,” Gunn says.

The case settled. In addition to the sum from the surgeon’s insurance company, Gunn and his clients insisted the doctor personally contribute  $100,000 to the punitive damages release, and that this portion not be subject to confidentiality. As with many of his catastrophically injured clients, he stayed in touch with the family. He sent the baby, Hope—who he says was “the cutest little girl”—a doll every year when she was a kid. 

Schulte says he still appreciates how Gunn handled that shocking moment. “Other attorneys would have screamed and yelled and maybe accused me and my co-counsel of burying the evidence,” he says. “But Lee was very professional and understanding. If he knows that you trust him, he’ll trust you.”

A native Michigander, Gunn says he passed up attending University of Michigan, where he was pre-admitted, left his Fiat convertible parked in a snowbank in a driveway, and opted for sunny University of Florida. He originally wanted to be an architect designing skyscrapers, but changed his mind after seeing groups of young architects sitting in cubicles doing drudge work.

After graduating from UF law school in 1982, he joined a large Tampa firm and handled insurance cases, notching lots of trial experience. At age 30, he started a defense firm with two other partners that grew to 18 lawyers. They represented national health care companies such as Humana as well as handling construction defect litigation. 

But he grew increasingly unhappy with this work. A turning point came when Gunn, representing a car-rental company, won a wrongful death case involving a teenage boy killed in a rental pickup truck rollover accident. The jury found that the teen was 90% at fault for not wearing a seat belt, leaving the grieving mother with just $10,000 in damages.

“I felt terrible,” he says. “My law school friend, Chip Merlin, said, ‘You can’t keep doing this.’ So I joined Chip’s plaintiff firm. I’m very happy I’ve spent the last 26 years helping individuals.”

Using his defense-side expertise, in 2010 he represented an employee of an international aerospace company, who fell down the shaft of a freight elevator at the firm’s facility in Tampa and suffered catastrophic injuries. 

Bill Smoak, a Tampa attorney who represented the employer in the case, recalls that Gunn turned himself into an expert in elevator design. In depositions, he challenged the company’s executives over the stark contrast between their high-tech, highly regulated products and the allegedly low-tech nature of the elevator serving their workers, Smoak recalls. 

But where Gunn really distinguished himself was in overcoming the company’s immunity defense under state workers’ compensation law. Gunn was one of only a handful of lawyers in Florida, Smoak says, who had the expertise to prove the elements of the state’s narrow exemption to workers’ comp immunity—that the injury was “virtually certain” to occur under conditions at the facility. “He overcame a very high bar to defeat my summary judgment in that case,” Smoak adds.

Smoak says Gunn successfully navigated all the difficult issues in the case to reach a favorable, confidential settlement for his client. “When I am handling a case against Lee, he lays it on the table,” he says. “There is no hide-the-ball. He’s one of the best there is, period.”

His willingness to take on challenging cases impresses judges and opposing attorneys even when he doesn’t win a big verdict or settlement. Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Lyann Goudie recalls presiding over a two-week jury trial in 2024 in which Gunn represented a young professional dancer who was injured in an auto accident and claimed a debilitating brain injury. 

Goudie thought from the start that it would be tough to prove damages to the jury, because the woman had preexisting conditions from earlier traumatic events. The jury ended up awarding only about $60,000—far less than Gunn sought.

“Lee put on a very good case,” she says. “I was really impressed with the fact that he cared so much for his client, and believed so much in her case, that he took it to trial despite it being difficult.”

Before that trial, Goudie adds, she had heard the other judges “rant and rave about how fabulous Lee is. Sometimes I don’t necessarily agree with their [attorney] assessments. But on this one I did.”

Gunn gets particularly passionate about cases in which medical providers talk patients into undergoing novel procedures that will allow them to market themselves as the first to offer them. In 2014, he represented a mother of four who became permanently disabled from a massive stroke after a neurosurgeon performed an experimental brain stent procedure to treat an aneurysm.

Gunn says the stent was approved only for larger aneurysms, but the doctor, who had a consulting contract with the device’s manufacturer, allegedly overstated the size of the patient’s lesion to justify the procedure. Gunn brokered a confidential settlement for the woman and her family. 

Gunn believes medical providers can sometimes lose sight of the goal of patient care as they attempt to be on the cutting edge of a new drug, method or technology. 

“Typically in early development of drugs, devices and procedures the reimbursement rates are better,” he says. “The highest profit margins in our health care delivery system tend to be in early phases … which maybe pushes institutions and providers to get ahead of themselves.”

He also is outspoken about critical delays in care and what he sees as worsening communication gaps between physicians and hospital staff, as physicians increasingly are supervising teams of mid-level practitioners. 

He is currently representing the family of a VA nurse who experienced gastrointestinal bleeding from an eroded gastric lap band. The suit alleges the emergency room physician knew this within minutes of the patient’s arrival, yet took hours to reach out to a surgeon to control the bleeding, and additional hours to effectuate her transport to said surgeon. “By the time she arrived at the specialty center,” Gunn alleges, “it was too late.” 

Recent years have yielded higher-than-usual jury verdicts in such cases, Gunn says, citing the Take Care of Maya case, documented in a Netflix film, as an example. “What you’re seeing is the anger that the public feels about health care,” he says. “The inability to get a timely appointment, the aloof doctor. They are expressing frustration about the huge amount of money they and their employers pay. They want a higher quality of care.”

Gunn sometimes takes a break during his workdays to text about state and national politics with his old law school friend Kevin Carey, who co-hosts a weekly political radio show called Voice of Reason. Carey, a former circuit judge, says his show is “progressive, anti-Republican and anti-Trump.”

“I’ve asked him to come on the show, but he wants to stay somewhat neutral,” Carey says with a chuckle.

Still, it’s not hard to get Gunn talking politics—from politicized appointments on the bench to the topics that matter to the jury box. Being politically attuned, he explains, is key to selecting juries in various communities around Florida. “Jurors are a reflection of their community, and understanding that community is critical,” he says. A case he currently is handling involves the issue of abortion. “I couldn’t try this case in red Florida,” he says. “Everything is political.”

Those who talk politics with Gunn are often surprised. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t understand how you can be a Republican when you advocate for so many personal liberties and the rights and protections of consumers. Aren’t those Democratic issues?’” Gunn laughs as he responds, “They’re people issues.”

Despite his antipathy to the Trump administration, he says he remains a Republican and hopes the GOP will shift to better reflect his values. It also puts him in a better position to talk, “as a Republican to a Republican,” to the GOP state lawmakers who control the state Legislature and shape policy on plaintiffs’ rights and access to the courts. He often goes to Tallahassee on behalf of the Florida Justice Association to try to fend off bills restricting lawsuits against insurers, businesses and medical providers. “Everything is tactical,” he says. 

Gunn’s wife, attorney Tracy Raffles Gunn at Gunn Appellate Practice, has helped him in that fight. In 2017, she and a team of attorneys persuaded the state Supreme Court to overturn one of the major GOP tort reform measures, a $500,000 cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice lawsuits. “Tracy is an incredible lawyer,” he says. “I attribute a lot of my success to our synergy. When I mess up, she fixes it on appeal. I need that resource more than I like to admit.” In addition to their attorney son, the couple have a daughter, Cameron, who is about to graduate from UCLA law school and has lined up a job as an appellate public defender in Manhattan. 

Gunn says he has no plans to slow down. But one change he did make in his stressful lifestyle when he turned 50 was taking up tennis seriously. He did it on the condition that Delton, then 12, start taking lessons with him. Now he plays four to five times a week. “It’s making a big difference in my health,” he says. “My doctor said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.’ Hopefully I’ll be here to practice law for a lot of healthy years with my son and my wife.”

Management Style

Bringing Delton into the firm at the end of 2023 served as a “reactivation and reset” for Gunn. “My philosophy is you have to be in this or out of this,” he says. “Being a 20-hour-a-week trial lawyer, I don’t know how guys do it. When I turned 65, I thought I’d take Fridays as a catch-up, relaxed day.” 

He turns to Delton and asks his son how many Fridays turned out to be relaxed days over the past year. “Maybe two,” replies Delton, who describes his father as a tough mentor. When attorneys at the firm come to his dad’s office to discuss cases, Delton notes, he expects them to think through problems and answer their own questions. “He says, ‘Be brief, be bright, be gone.’”