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.
Hinshaw reports this case in which the court sanctioned four attorneys for conduct at a deposition, including one who instructed his client not to answer outrageous questions but who neither claimed a protected privilege nor applied for a protective order under FRCP 30(d).
"The court described this case as a “grudge match.” Id. at *1.
We the People USA, a franchise of do-it-yourself legal centers that hope to do to the legal profession what H&R Block did to tax accountants. They sell legal forms, and in some instances have gone too far in "helping" clients. One customer wanted to start a malpractice case.
Morgese went to the store for…
Agency’s Former Counsel Held Liable in Contracting Scheme // C.A. Says Conflict-of-Interest Statute Allows Recovery of Payments to Independent Contractor
KENNETH OFGANG, of Metro News-Enterprise reports:
"The former counsel for the California Housing Finance Agency and a company in which he held an undisclosed interest must return payments made to the business under a contract…
Plaintiff wanted to buy a building, convert to a condo/coop and evict or buy out tenants. It’s a big time business in NY. Problem? The Unincorporated Business Law Professor’s Blog reports this case: Yassky v. Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Schlissel, P.C., 36 A.D.3d 420 (N.Y.A.D. 1 Dept. 2007).
"Plaintiff had retained the law firm to…
Here is a case reported by the Abstract Appeal Blog. Plaintiff’s toxic tort case was lost through negligence. His legal malpractice case was bifurcated, and he won the liability phase. However, the jury detemined that there was no proximate case. Ergo, no proximate cause, no damages.
Hinshaw reports on a two step process which allows a law firm to require binding arbitration on legal fees in California.
"Under this decision, a California law firm’s insistence on binding arbitration is a two-step process. First, the firm must insert such a provision in its retainer agreement. Second, the firm must offer the client…
Dismissal – outright dismissal of a case for failure timely to file a note of issue, is becoming a well known event in many of the metro counties. Unlike New York county, where extensions of the date to file a Note of Issue are regularly sought and granted, in Kings and Nassau, for example, the…
Plaintiff is a doctor who was sued in medical malpractice for an Erbs palsy case. He settled, and then turned to sue his attorney alleging that the attorney forced him to settle, failed to use photographs of the birth which woul have exonorated him, and allowing the doctor to be reported to the National Practitioner…
Legal malpractice in criminal defense does not exist. Bluntly put, a criminal defendant may not successfully sue his criminal defense attorney absent a showing of “actual innocence”. This translates to: reversal, ineffective assistance of counsel determined by a CPL§ 440 motion or exculpation.
Scott H. Greenfield reports an interesting take on this issue in his …
A report from Hinshaw:
"After a union’s health care fund failed to pay numerous benefits on behalf of its members, suit was filed against the Fund’s trustees and the third-party administrator, alleging multiple ERISA violations. The trustees then brought a third-party complaint against their attorneys, alleging legal malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty. The…
