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.
As in New York, a criminal defendant may not successfully sue his criminal defense attorney absent a showing of "actual innocence"
Here is the Texas rule:
"In Butler v. Mason, No. 11-05-00273-CV, 2006 Tex. App. Lexis 10886 (Tex. App.—Eastland 2006), a convicted murderer attempted to bring a legal malpractice action against the attorney who…
Another Texas case to illustrate the judgment rule in legal malpractice.
"Doing the best you can with what you have is a constant problem in unsettled areas of the law, particularly unsettled areas of statutory construction. Justice Keasler’s concurring opinion in this Court of Criminal Appeals case makes the point:
In Ex parte Chandler, we…
When a client comes to you to discuss a legal malpractice case, and mentions a bankruptcy, the first question to determine is whether the malpractice might have been pre- or post-petition. If it was even arguably pre-petition, the bankrupt client must have listed a claim on the schedules. If not, there can be no legal…
Here is a Texas Case which illustrates the difficulty in plaintiff’s summary judgment in legal malpractice. The court says that expert’s affidavit is ‘conclusory", but what it really means is that it cannot decide on whether the mistake was all that apparent.
"What “appears” to an expert to be an “inescapable conclusion” is not so…
Continuous representation of a client by an attorney allows a law suit within [in NY – 3 years] a statutory period of time. That is, the statute of limitations does not kick in until the reprsentation has ended. When this happens is the subject of many cases. Here is a Texas case which holds that…
New York Lawyer [subscription] relates this story:
"Local Lawyer’s Conniption Fit at Getting Sued Gets Him Sanctioned
New York Lawyer
May 4, 2007
By Henry Gottlieb
New Jersey Law Journal
When a lawyer is served with a malpractice suit, throwing the complaint on the floor, ejecting the process server for trespassing and yelling "call 911"…
Reported today from Bankruptcy Court:
In re: Ernst, 04-12291
Decided: April 27, 2007
"UNDER A retainer agreement allowing interest on unpaid fees, the lawyer providing legal services to the debtor brought a state action to collect $72,274 in unpaid legal fees from the debtor and his wife. Shortly after entry of an award in the…
Thomas Liotti, who has of late been pushing the bounds of criminal defendant representation, and has, incidently, sued the Nassau County DA, is in the news for an inventive investigation.
His client was accused of abusing a child. The child and its parents were the subject of a neglect proceeding in Family Court, and Liotti…
Wife obtained a judgment against her divorcing husband for $ 750,000. Her attorney took his time entering the judgment, and violated 22 NYCRR 202.48(a), which provides 60 days after the entry of an order directing settlement of the judgment to submit a proposed judgment. Holding? Plaintiff loses her judgment!
Farkas v Farkas
2007 NY Slip…
Legal malpractice is sometimes just about missing a deadline. Sometimes its just about being lazy. One recurrent theme is attorneys taking on a field in which they do not understand the subtle problems. Here is an example:
"One of the Prohibited Words is the phrase “prior art”. There is no reason whatsoever for the words…
