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.
We are continuing to discuss the Gotay case, 2008 NY Slip Op 08432.
Defendants remain in the case on the basis that it was unclear that they intended to, or actually had ended their representation. CPLR 321 is the manner in which an attorney ends the relationship, absent a court order. In this long-running medical…
Law.Com reports the Gotay v. Brietbart2008 NY Slip Op 08432
Decided on November 6, 2008
Appellate Division, First Department
Lippman, P.J., case. This case addresses what may be the last reference to a change in New York law which roiled the waters for several years. Once, long ago, an action was commenced by service of…
Plaintiffs were aspiring Broadway Musical producers, and contracted for the rights to a Barry Manilow production, Harmony. Alas, it was not to be. Producing a play/musical for Broadway takes a lot of money, and it appears from the court decision that this production was "undercapitilized,"
Things went badly, and ended in the producers losing…
Some time ago, the Court of Appeals decided Santulli v Englert, Reilly & McHugh, P.C., 78 N.Y.2d 700, [1992]. The upshot of that decision was that plaintiff could plead both negligence and breach of contract, and each had different statutes of limitation, 3 and 6 years. This led to a plethora of claims against attorneys…
We’ve been revisiting this theme over the past year. When one thinks legal malpractice, the most common image is that of the personal injury client whose statute of limitations was blown. However, today we see a significant rise of legal malpractice in the financial field. Trustees in bankruptcy, receivers and cases coming out of the…
Do politics play a part in justice? Often clients believe that a judge is biased either for them or against them. At times the client ascribes that bias to politics.
Attorneys make large contributions to judicial campaigns. A recent article in the NYLJ described one upstate powerhouse law firm which routinely made contributions of $…
Privity is the term which describes the relationship between plaintiff and a specific attorney. People are not permitted to sue attorneys, in legal malpractice, unless there has been a professional relationship between them. While it may seem obvious in a general sense, the devil is, as always, in the details. May an executror sue the…
Privity of representation by an attorney of the client is a bedrock concept of legal malpractice. One interesting situation is in union paid attorney representation. An alluring benefit of membership in a union is pre-paid or free legal representation in certain situations, This benefit may mean that there is no real attorney-client relationship sufficient for…
A common law retaining lien, known also as a "general possessory lien" entitles the outgoing attorney to "retain all papers, securities, or money belonging to the client" that came into the attorney’s possession in the course of representation, as security for payment of attorney’s fees"
A retaining lien arises from Judiciary Law 475 and is…
In this legal malpractice case, Provenzano v. Pearlman [subscription], recently decided in EDNY, plaintiff was struck in the head by an errant television camera, while on the set of a news TV show. She went to trial in Supreme Kings and lost. Now, she sues her attorneys in EDNY.
Defendants, who represented themselves in…
