Nicholas P. Mizell
How Judge Mizell decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
What persuades
Florida first-party property-insurance practice is the core of his Fort Myers docket: he treats a policy's appraisal clause as a mandatory, contractually-stipulated forum for amount-of-loss disputes, compels appraisal once the insured substantially complies with post-loss conditions and the insurer has had a reasonable chance to investigate, and refuses to let an insurer wield post-loss conditions (such as an EUO it has declined) as a 'sword.' Coverage and fraud defenses are preserved for after appraisal.
“when an insurance policy contains an appraisal provision, the right to appraisal is not permissive but is instead mandatory, so once a demand for appraisal is made, neither party has the right to deny that demand.”
On default judgments he does not treat default as automatic: the moving party must still plead facts that state a plausible claim (the same sufficiency a complaint needs to survive a Rule 12(b)(6) motion), because a defaulted defendant admits well-pleaded facts but not conclusions of law, before he will recommend entry of judgment.
“A defaulted defendant is deemed to admit all well-pleaded allegations of fact but is not held to admit facts not well-pleaded or to admit conclusions of law.”
For nonparty discovery, he requires the movant to establish relevance and proportionality under Rules 45 and 26. Prior production in a different lawsuit does not by itself make documents responsive where the cases involve different claims, defendants, and time periods.
“Toptal has not met its burden of proving that the 271 at-issue documents are relevant or responsive to the Andela subpoena.”
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“For the following reasons, the Court recommends that the Motion for Default Judgment (Doc. 9) be granted. ... GSI has pleaded plausible facts showing that it prevailed in an arbitration against Dogali ... Therefore, the Court finds a sufficient basis in the pleadings for a default judgment to enforce the arbitration award against Dogali.”
“The motion to compel appraisal (Doc. 35) is GRANTED. For the amount of loss that remains in dispute (that is, excluding the roof claim), the parties are ordered to conduct an appraisal as prescribed by the appraisal provisions of the insurance policy.”
“For these reasons, Toptal's motion to compel (Doc. 1) is DENIED.”
“Toptal's request for oral argument as to its motion to compel (Doc. 16) is DENIED as moot.”
Caseload & timing
From public federal docket records for this judge.
Caseload mix is descriptive, from the dockets he was referred into; because he is a referral magistrate the cases are owned by the assigned district judge, so per-judge case durations are not attributed to him.
Put Judge Mizell's record to work
Ezel drafts and answers grounded in this exact profile: how Judge Mizell actually rules, not a generic AI guess.
Opens in Ezel Pro. Every answer is grounded in Judge Mizell's own signed orders and cites them.