Andrew Lavoott Bluestone has been an attorney for 40 years, with a career that spans criminal prosecution, civil litigation and appellate litigation. Mr. Bluestone became an Assistant District Attorney in Kings County in 1978, entered private practice in 1984 and in 1989 opened his private law office and took his first legal malpractice case.
Since 1989, Bluestone has become a leader in the New York Plaintiff’s Legal Malpractice bar, handling a wide array of plaintiff’s legal malpractice cases arising from catastrophic personal injury, contracts, patents, commercial litigation, securities, matrimonial and custody issues, medical malpractice, insurance, product liability, real estate, landlord-tenant, foreclosures and has defended attorneys in a limited number of legal malpractice cases.
Bluestone also took an academic role in field, publishing the New York Attorney Malpractice Report from 2002-2004. He started the “New York Attorney Malpractice Blog” in 2004, where he has published more than 4500 entries.
Mr. Bluestone has written 38 scholarly peer-reviewed articles concerning legal malpractice, many in the Outside Counsel column of the New York Law Journal. He has appeared as an Expert witness in multiple legal malpractice litigations.
Mr. Bluestone is an adjunct professor of law at St. John’s University College of Law, teaching Legal Malpractice. Mr. Bluestone has argued legal malpractice cases in the Second Circuit, in the New York State Court of Appeals, each of the four New York Appellate Divisions, in all four of the U.S. District Courts of New York and in Supreme Courts all over the state. He has also been admitted pro haec vice in the states of Connecticut, New Jersey and Florida and was formally admitted to the US District Court of Connecticut and to its Bankruptcy Court all for legal malpractice matters. He has been retained by U.S. Trustees in legal malpractice cases from Bankruptcy Courts, and has represented municipalities, insurance companies, hedge funds, communications companies and international manufacturing firms. Mr. Bluestone regularly lectures in CLEs on legal malpractice.
Based upon his professional experience Bluestone was named a Diplomate and was Board Certified by the American Board of Professional Liability Attorneys in 2008 in Legal Malpractice. He remains Board Certified. He was admitted to The Best Lawyers in America from 2012-2019. He has been featured in Who’s Who in Law since 1993.
In the last years, Mr. Bluestone has been featured for two particularly noteworthy legal malpractice cases. The first was a settlement of an $11.9 million dollar default legal malpractice case of Yeo v. Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman which was reported in the NYLJ on August 15, 2016. Most recently, Mr. Bluestone obtained a rare plaintiff’s verdict in a legal malpractice case on behalf of the City of White Plains v. Joseph Maria, reported in the NYLJ on February 14, 2017. It was the sole legal malpractice jury verdict in the State of New York for 2017.
Bluestone has been at the forefront of the development of legal malpractice principles and has contributed case law decisions, writing and lecturing which have been recognized by his peers. He is regularly mentioned in academic writing, and his past cases are often cited in current legal malpractice decisions. He is recognized for his ample writings on Judiciary Law § 487, a 850 year old statute deriving from England which relates to attorney deceit.
Alksom Realty LLC v Baranik 2015 NY Slip Op 50869(U) Decided on June 9, 2015 Supreme Court, Kings County Demarest, J. is a case that touches two of the most relevant issues to a New Yorker, especially a Manhattanite, real estate and taxes. Looking at this story, one asks, how could this happen?
Plaintiff has…
Legal Malpractice is an attorney’s failure to use minimally adequate levels of care, skill or diligence in the performance of representation of the client, causing harm. In New York, attorney malpractice is defined as a deviation or departure from good and accepted legal practice, where the client has been proximately damaged by that deviation, but…
Judiciary Las § 487 claims are widely brought, but remain elusive. Courts seem to want to reserve them for the most egregious situations, and will dismiss any number of cases that do not meet their catastrophic criteria. Gumarova v Law Offs. of Paul A. Boronow, P.C. 2015 NY Slip Op 05155 Decided on June 17,…
OK, so the client comes into the office, and you think you might take the case. Then, after further thought, you think you might not take the case. What do you do? How do you do it? Lindsay v Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano LLP 2015 NY Slip Op 04819 Decided on June…
A frequently recurring legal malpractice issue arises when one law firm handles a workers’ compensation case arising from a personal injury. One such example is Lindsay v Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano LLP 2015 NY Slip Op 04819 Decided on June 10, 2015 Appellate Division, Second Department. There are three lessons to be…
In a situation where one needs the program to know who the players are, Miuccio v Straci
2015 NY Slip Op 05101 Decided on June 16, 2015 Appellate Division, First Department appears to be a legal malpractice case. However, one needs to read well into the short opinion to gather that Plaintiff is suing Defendant…
Coccia v Liotti 2015 NY Slip Op 04801 Decided on June 10, 2015 Appellate Division, Second Department is a strange case. Mr. Liotti is a well known legal malpractice defendant. This legal malpractice case sputtered to a halt after Plaintiff successfully wiped out all of Mr. Liotti’s counterclaims for fees. We are perplexed.
“In 2003,…
This case is the sad story of bad medicine, bad guardianships and death. Sutch v Sutch-Lenz
2015 NY Slip Op 04692 Decided on June 4, 2015 Appellate Division, Third Department. It starts off with medical malpractice, the death of a father-husband in a flight school training accident, success in the medical malpractice and a money…
Dawson v Schoenberg 2015 NY Slip Op 04603 Decided on June 3, 2015 Appellate Division, Second Department is the sister case to Dawson which we discussed yesterday. As is well settled, in a legal malpractice case against a former defense attorney, plaintiff must demonstrate that the conviction “was due to the attorney’s actions alone and…
Today, we will examine the criminal conviction – legal malpractice case from Plaintiff’s point of view. Dawson v Schoenberg
2015 NY Slip Op 04603 Decided on June 3, 2015 Appellate Division, Second Department is really a disheartening view of human interactions. It seems that everyone in this story was poorly treated.
From the decision on…
