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.
It’s said that there is a general level of good practice standards for attorneys in New York, and its well settled that all attorneys are expected to practice at the level (admittedly not the very highest level) of good practice among competent attorneys in New York. What does this actually mean?
The question of how…
We’ve read and re-read the decision in Risk Control Assoc. Ins. Group v Maloof, Lebowitz, Connahan & Oleske, P.C. 2014 NY Slip Op 00419 Decided on January 23, 2014 Appellate Division, First Department and we still cannot see how plaintiff thought it could proceed. It was not the insurance company which hired defense attorneys, nor…
Judge Lippman once wrote that allowing legal malpractice proceedings against the criminal defense attorney absent "actual innocence" would be very very bad. "We see no compelling reason to depart from the established rule limiting recovery [*4]in legal malpractice actions to pecuniary damages. Allowing this type of recovery would have, at best, negative and, at worst…
Today’sNYLJ article by Andrew Keshner gives the background to a very high level spat between marquee named attorneys Ire Lee Sorkin, Judd Bernstein and Raoul Felder. Was it deceit, or was it just good old bare-knuckled lawyering?
"In two separate rulings, one state and one federal judge declined to punish high-profile attorney Ira Lee…
Clients think about suing their attorney; they think long and hard. Sometimes, they get distracted, and time passes. Sometimes too much consideration leads to too much delay. As an example, in this case Plaintiff’s mother brought a personal injury case against the City of New York for plaintiff from an injury of December 20, 2002.
In the past several years we’ve been given unprecedented access to court records. No more is it necessary to travel to the courthouse to review a file, nor must we wait for the clerk to mail (or not mail) a decision. The Court’s online presence has rapidly increased. However, access to written decisions is not…
Our meme is that legal malpractice is ubiquitous and may arise in almost any setting. Here, in a medical malpractice case we see what could have been a nasty legal malpractice had the AD no intervened. In Westchester, cases go the the Trial Assignment Part which has broad discretion in the scheduling of trials. There…
QBE Ins. Corp. v Lebowitz 2013 NY Slip Op 31752(U) July 11, 2013 Supreme Court, New York County Docket Number: 600412/10 Judge: Milton A. Tingling leads one to the question, How could this happen? Law firm defends insurance company, and routine discovery demands are served. Routine discovery demands are ignored. Not until after the…
Bedsores are a cardinal mark of neglect in hospital care. They need never occur, and once they are created, should/could/must be treated so that they go away. The decedent in this legal malpractice case was treated horribly. The survivors then hired an attorney who let the case go, and himself was disbarred upon a guilty…
Attorney sues Client for legal fees. Opening a legal malpractice blog with that sentence is akin to starting a novel with "it was a dark and stormy night…" So much of legal malpractice litigation arises after a fee dispute that "Fee dispute-legal malpractice" is a google search term. Here, in Brill & Meisel v Brown …
