Recently, Florida courts have been prioritizing following the rules exactly, rather than understanding the reason behind them. This is important for people in the construction industry to pay attention to. The issue is with F.S. §713.06, which says that subcontractors and suppliers who don’t have a direct contract with the owner of a property have to send a specific “notice to owner” at the right time to protect their rights to claim a construction lien. Florida statutes require contractors and suppliers to give notice to the property owner before filing a construction lien. The notice doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be close to the required form. Courts have upheld construction liens even when there were minor mistakes in the notice. However, in some cases, if the required warnings are not included in the notice, the lien may be invalidated. In a recent court case, the court refused to enforce a lien because the notice sent to the contractor and owner was not exactly in the form required by law. The court suggested that only the specific form provided by the law would be sufficient for a lien. The concern about this issue comes from changes to the law in 1991, which made it mandatory for the notice to be in the specific form and also required strict compliance with time requirements. However, the law still requires that the owner must be adversely affected for the lien to be valid. In the case Stresscon v. Madiedo, the Florida Supreme Court had to decide if a statement of account that wasn’t notarized could be fixed with an after-the-fact affidavit. The court said no, because the law required precise compliance. But they also said that if there are specific exceptions in the law, then substantial compliance or no adverse effect could be considered. This means that contractors and suppliers need to be really careful to follow the law exactly when filing a lien.
Source: https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/subcontractors-suppliers-beware-form-over-substance/
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