When Can You Use Unclean Hands as a Defense to a Lawsuit

The “unclean hands” defense is used when, if you are being sued, and the other side used been unethical or even just made errors in the filing.

When can you use unclean hands as a defense to a lawsuit. Hello, my name is John Pankauski.
The trial lawyers and the appellate attorney’s at Pankauski Hauser handle a number of litigation matters throughout the state of Florida. And many times we are brought into cases to
replace counsel, to assist the client with now taking over the case and when that happens
we try and do is review the pleadings or the court file documents that have been filed
and if our client is being sued we ask ourselves whether we can raise any affirmative defenses.
Can we raise any defenses, have defenses been raised and have they been raised properly.
One defense is called unclean hands, it has a very limited application but in essence
if somebody is suing you, and they haven’t done things right or properly or there are
some type of wrong. You may be able to bring up a defense of unclean hands.
Try to understand what unclean hands maybe difficult but there is a recent March 14th
2018 appellate court opinion from Florida’s 4th District Court of Appeal, The District
Court in Palm Breach which is literally down the street from our law office.
You can read more about unclean hands by reading the McMichael vs. Deutsche Bank National Trustee Company.
The case number is 40163879. The opinion was issue March 14th 2018 and you can read it free of charge by going to the 4th DCA website, clicking on opinions and scrolling down to the date.