In Barber v. Stanko, the Pennsylvania Superior Court confronted a tangled morass of a case involving a structured settlement. The payee was a minor whose father sold more than $1.5 million of that settlement to third parties. The facts are equal parts unfortunate and convoluted, but in the end, the minor sought to coordinate the matter in Allegheny County, where a court had approved of the structured settlement when he was a toddler. His father had forum-shopped until he found a Butler County court that was willing to approve the sale of his son’s structured settlement money. The Superior Court assessed the standards for coordinating a case in another county under Pa.R.Civ.P. 213.1 and affirmed the lower court’s order compelling the matter to be heard in Allegheny County, where the son wanted the case heard.
