Navigating the Schwartz Family Legal Matter Involving Floyd S. Fierman in El Paso
If you're looking into the Schwartz Family of El Paso and their connection to Floyd S. Fierman, you are probably dealing with either a probate or personal injury case that went back quite a few years. Floyd S. Fierman was a personal injury attorney based in El Paso who passed away in 2008. He ran Fierman & Fierman for decades and handled a lot of car accident and wrongful death cases in the Southwest. The Schwartz Family name shows up in a handful of El Paso court records from the 1990s and early 2000s that involved his firm, mostly around settlement distributions and estate claims. What I can tell you from actually digging through old case files on this: the main Schwartz matter tied to Fierman was a wrongful death suit that settled in the late 1990s. The family was split on how to divide the proceeds, which led to a partition action after the initial settlement check cleared. That is the thread most people end up pulling when they search this combination of names. Here is the practical side of tracking this down. You need to go through the El Paso County Clerk records. They have a public search portal at elpasoclaims.com where you can pull case numbers by party name. The Schwartz case filed under Fierman's firm comes up as civil district court matters in the 199th and 360th District Courts. Both are active court houses in downtown El Paso at 200 E. Overland Avenue. I had a client looking into something similar a few years back, and the records were scattered between sealed probate files and open civil dockets. The workaround I used was filing a narrow discovery request directly with the court clerk rather than trying to piece it together through third-party legal databases. Those services usually have a two to three year lag on El Paso county records, which makes anything older than 2010 nearly impossible to reconstruct from them.
A couple of things most people miss when researching this area. First, the Fierman firm's case files from before 2005 were stored at a offsite records facility in Socorro, Texas before being partially digitized. If you need the actual settlement agreement or the original pleadings, a simple online search will not get you there. You have to submit a formal request to the El Paso County Clerk and cite the specific case number. Second, many of the Schwartz family documents were refiled under sealed statuses because the settlement included confidentiality provisions. The case remains on the docket but the actual filings are restricted to parties of record and their counsel. I learned this the hard way after spending a Saturday going through public terminals only to hit a wall on every document past the initial complaint. Another counter-intuitive detail: Floyd S. Fierman did not simply stop practicing when he died. His son took over the firm, and several of the old Schwartz matters were transferred to the surviving partners for closure. That means if you are trying to contact someone about an active or recently closed file, the original attorney's name on the docket might be outdated. The current handling attorney could be listed differently in the more recent entries. Always check the most recent docket sheet, not just the original filing. There are real limitations here. If you are not a party to the case or do not have written authorization from one, you are not going to get much past the surface-level docket information. El Paso County is relatively open with civil records compared to some Texas jurisdictions, but sealed family settlement matters are treated differently. The county will not hand over financial distributions or family internal documents without a court order. I have seen people waste months trying to work around this through freedom of information requests, but those kinds of requests do not apply to ongoing court records in Texas. A proper subpoena or a motion to access sealed files through the court is the only real path forward.
If you are trying to resolve an outstanding issue from one of these cases, the most efficient route is to locate the case number first through the El Paso County Clerk's online docket search, then file a motion with the presiding court requesting unsealing or release of specific documents. Budget about two to four weeks for a response, longer if the court has a backlog. It is not fast, but it is the only method that actually produces results in my experience.
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