We’ve said that legal malpractice issues are ubiquitous, and omnipresent.  That’s just another way of saying that where there are lawyers, and where they practice their human crafts, there will be mistakes and shortcomings.  This was true before the Magna Carta and is true today. 

One example of the evolving nature of legal malpractice issues is the Internet. Predictable only in science fiction, the Internet has come to color every part of our lives.  Use of the Internet in the age-old practice of trial law has set new standards.  So reports Anthony E. Davis in the New York Law Journal.  While he discusses the ethical issue of how one might correctly research jurors now sitting at a trial, he raises the point that failure to investigate may be legal malpractice.

"Duty to Investigate
The first question to be addressed is whether lawyers are under any duty to conduct any investigation of jurors. City Bar 2012-2 looked at this in the second segment of the opinion, including the following observation:
Lawyers have even been chastised for not conducting such research on potential jurors. For example, in a recent Missouri case, a juror failed to disclose her prior litigation history in response to a voir dire question. After a verdict was rendered, plaintiff’s counsel investigated the juror’s civil litigation history using Missouri’s automated case record service and found that the juror had failed to disclose that she was previously a defendant in several debt collection cases and a personal injury action. (Footnote omitted). Although the court upheld plaintiff’s request for a new trial based on juror nondisclosure, the court noted that "in light of advances in technology allowing greater access to information that can inform a trial court about the past litigation history of venire members, it is appropriate to place a greater burden on the parties to bring such matters to the court’s attention at an earlier stage." Johnson v. McCullough, 306 S.W.3d 551, 558-59 (Mo. 2010). The court also stated that "litigants should endeavour to prevent retrials by completing an early investigation." Id. at 559.
Earlier, in the introduction to the opinion, the city bar went even further, stating that: "Indeed, standards of competence and diligence may require doing everything reasonably possible to learn about the jurors who will sit in judgment on a case."
Notably, ABA 466 is in agreement with this proposition. In footnote 3, ABA 466 cites to this statement in City Bar 2012-2 and to other sources, including Comment [8] to Model Rule 1.1, to the Johnson v. McCullough decision (supra), and to N. H. Bar Ass’n, Op. 2012-13/05, which, in common with Comment 8 to Model Rule 1.1, addresses attorneys’ obligation "to be aware of social media as a source of potentially useful information in litigation, to be competent to obtain that information directly or through an agent, and to know how to make effective use of that information in litigation."