Scott Hirsch Law Group, PLLC

Focus and practice areas

Scott Hirsch Law Group, PLLC works on the plaintiff's side of two connected fields: securities litigation and consumer protection. The firm represents individual investors and consumers. It describes itself as a boutique practice.

The securities half covers FINRA arbitration, securities fraud, financial fraud, and claims against stockbrokers or financial advisors accused of misconduct. The consumer half covers class actions, data breach and data privacy matters, defective product claims, and false advertising. The two halves share a shape: one side has the money and the documents, and the client is trying to recover a loss they did not cause.

Where the two sides meet

The $15 million settlement the firm reports came from a financial services data breach. That single result touches both practice groups at once. Financial firms hold account numbers, balances, and identity documents, so a breach at one of them is a consumer privacy matter and a financial services matter in the same file.

How investor claims usually proceed

Most disputes between a customer and a brokerage go to FINRA arbitration rather than to court, because the customer agreement signed at account opening says so. This is general background on how these claims move, not a description of any specific matter the firm has handled.

A claimant files a statement of claim with FINRA Dispute Resolution Services. The panel is usually three arbitrators for larger claims, drawn from FINRA's roster. Discovery is narrower than in civil litigation and runs largely on FINRA's own document production lists. Hearings are private, and awards are published but brief.

The documents that decide these cases tend to be the same set every time: the new account form, the risk tolerance questionnaire, monthly statements, trade confirmations, and whatever the broker wrote down at the time. In my opinion, a firm that names FINRA arbitration first among its practice areas is signalling that it works inside that document set regularly rather than treating arbitration as an occasional detour from court practice.

How class actions and data breach claims work

Consumer class actions follow a different track. A named plaintiff files on behalf of a group, and a federal judge decides whether the group can be certified under Rule 23. Certification turns on whether the members share common questions and whether one lawyer can fairly represent all of them.

Data breach cases add a threshold question about standing: courts ask what concrete harm a plaintiff suffered when their data was exposed. Some plaintiffs point to fraudulent charges, others to time spent freezing credit. Settlements in this area often combine cash payments with credit monitoring and with security commitments from the defendant.

False advertising and defective product claims run on their own proof problems. The first turns on what a reasonable consumer would take a label or ad to mean. The second turns on the product itself, which usually means testing, engineering records, and complaint histories held by the manufacturer.

How the team is built

Scott D. Hirsch founded the firm. His work covers securities arbitration and litigation for investors and class action lawsuits for consumers, which lines up with the practice areas the firm lists. The site states he has over 17 years of experience.

He is a member of the Florida State Bar and is admitted to the United States District Courts for the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida. Those two federal districts cover most of the state's population, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Federal court admission matters here, since consumer class actions are frequently filed in or removed to federal court.

Jennifer Hirsch is the office manager and head paralegal. She has been with the firm since 2013. Paralegal continuity of that length carries weight in this kind of practice, because the person who assembles a decade of account statements or organizes claims data for a class is doing work the case depends on.

What a boutique structure means for a client

The site names one attorney. As a reviewer, that tells a prospective client something useful about who will handle their file. In a firm of this size, the founder is the person on the case, and questions go to him.

What the record shows

The firm reports two results: a $58 million settlement in a securities fraud matter and a $15 million settlement in a financial services data breach case. Both are settlements, which is where the large majority of these disputes end. Class actions in particular are resolved by court-approved settlement far more often than by verdict.

Figures at that scale indicate group-wide recoveries, since individual investor arbitrations rarely reach eight figures. The site does not describe the underlying facts of either case, so a reader should treat them as reported outcomes and nothing more.

Reach and how the firm is paid

The firm keeps two offices, one in Coconut Creek, Florida and one in Rockville, Maryland, and it represents clients nationwide. FINRA arbitration and federal class actions both travel well. Arbitration hearings are scheduled near the customer's home under FINRA rules, and class counsel litigates wherever the case is properly filed. A two-office footprint fits that model.

Work is taken on a contingency basis. In practice this means the fee is a share of what the client recovers, which is the standard arrangement for plaintiff-side securities and consumer work.

The site publishes no email address and routes contact through a form. It lists no social media accounts. In my opinion, that is a reasonable choice for a plaintiff's firm handling matters where a prospective client may want to describe an account loss or a privacy incident in confidence before anything is public.

The firm does not state a founding year on its website. What the site does date is Jennifer Hirsch's arrival in 2013, which places the practice in operation by that year.

Attorney education and chronology

The attorney record identifies St. Thomas University School of Law as Scott D. Hirsch's law school and gives 2007 as his JD year. That dated credential adds a concrete point to the professional history. It also gives prospective clients a way to distinguish formal education from the broader career information in the profile.

The confirmed admission-year field is blank. A separate enrichment field carries a 2008 admission-year hint drawn from an Avvo profile. Those entries have different levels of certainty. I would treat the 2007 JD year as part of the directory record and the 2008 date as information that calls for confirmation before publication as a bar admission year.

How the practice is classified

The directory categories provide more detail about how the firm's work is organized. Securities law and securities litigation appear as separate entries. Investment fraud also has its own category, while broker misconduct is paired with FINRA. This structure lets a reader search by the governing field or by the type of dispute that prompted the inquiry.

The consumer categories make a similar distinction. Consumer protection is the broad entry, while consumer fraud and scams is listed separately. Civil litigation also appears as an independent category. These labels are useful for directory navigation because a prospective client may describe a problem by the conduct involved rather than by the eventual form of the case.

The Coconut Creek address and telephone contacts

The directory gives the Florida street address as 6810 N. State Road 7, Coconut Creek, FL. Including the full street address matters for a firm whose name may appear in searches from outside Florida. It gives readers a precise office location rather than a city-level reference.

Two telephone numbers appear in the record: (561) 710-2837 and (301) 569-1339. The record does not assign a particular number to an office or label either one by function. A directory should therefore reproduce both as published contacts without identifying either as a main line, intake line, or fax number.