Need to have Standing to Bring Lawsuit
You need to have standing to bring a lawsuit.
In a recent case, Northwest Baptist Church of Cocoa, Inc. v. Trutee Corp. of the King Street Baptist Church, Inc., 51 Fla. L. Weekly D1592c (Fla. 5th DCA 2026), a plaintiff was found not to have standing to bring the lawsuit. The plaintiff filed the lawsuit claiming it was owner of the property based on a reversionary interest in a deed. The problem was the property was subsequently conveyed. The court found that the subsequent conveyance killed the plaintiff’s standing to bring the lawsuit. “Thus, with this transfer of the property to [third party], [plaintiff] lost all rights and legally cognizable interest in the subject property. In the end, [plaintiff] now is nothing more than a predecessor in interest of the subject property — a predecessor who by the plain language of the deeds before us, retains no ownership, possessory, or reversionary interest whatsoever in the property at issue in the litigation. As a result, it is clear that the deeds wholly defeat [plaintiff’s] claim of standing based thereon.” Northwest Baptist Church, supra.
Further, the plaintiff argued, years into the litigation, that it had standing based on assignments. This argument also failed.
These assignments are facially insufficient to grant standing to [plaintiff] to bring this case. … And since on the date of the filing of the initial complaint in this case [plaintiff] had not been assigned the rights of the minority members of [third party], [plaintiff] lacked standing to bring its claims.
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The doctrine of relation back, see Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.190(c), does not salvage [plaintiff’s] standing argument. “This rule does not permit a party to establish the right to maintain an action retroactively by acquiring standing to file a lawsuit after the fact.” Thus, [plaintiff] was without standing when its initial complaint was filed.
Northwest Baptist Church, supra (internal citations omitted)
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