Here's what I filed yesterday on Scott Rothstein, the lawyer at the center of the collapse of a Fort Lauderdale law firm. The allegation by his partners is that he was selling investments, using the firm's offices and name to promote the deals. The circular I saw for the investments offered impossibly high returns. The offering mentioned hundreds of such settlements, but I have seen the terms of only a few deals. Today's Wall Street Journal mentions 26 trust accounts that held an eye-popping sum of mone. "Mr. (Stuart) Rosenfeldt (A partner at the law firm with Rothstein) said he learned that on Oct. 23 the accounts contained about $500 million, but that the money was gone by Oct. 30," the Journal said.

Investing with Scott Rothstein

Circulating around South Florida in recent months were “confidential” offerings to investors about extremely high-paying but largely unregulated investments.

One from April involved a $1.8 million legal settlement. Another from August promised to pay investors a 36 percent return on their investment – which is much more than troubled stock and bond markets have returned recently.

“Every time I heard about them I just said, no way,” said Mark F. Raymond, managing partner of Broad and Cassel in Miami who says he convinced at least one client not to invest. “It amazes me in light of Madoff and Stanford that people even put their fingerprints on them.”

The investment offering connected to Rothstein was written in a way that makes it clear it was to be kept quiet.

The August circular says the investment strategy is to buy into a settlement that occurs before a trial begins, “in a manner that does not qualify as a structured settlement, therefore not being subject to court approval.”

A structured settlement typically is something a court approves in a legal case in which an injured person wins a large sum of money. The person or company that lost the lawsuit hands over the money to an insurance company to purchase an annuity contract. The annuity then pays the injured person for the rest of his life.

They are commonly used in large legal settlements. “In the ones for millions of dollars we always try to convince the client that they need to structure a good portion of it. Otherwise, statistically, the money’s gone,” said Adam Doner, a personal injury attorney in Palm Beach Gardens.

If the person doesn’t want to wait for his payout, he has the right to sell his settlement, but the terms of the transfer must be approved by a court, under Florida law.

The settlements and the brokers that buy and sell them don’t appear to be regulated by the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, said spokeswoman Holly Hinson after an initial review. But the deals might fall under state or federal securities regulation if it were determined that what was being sold qualified as a security, she said.