Thanks for the write up in Sui Generis of our report last week on Suspension in New York and Legal Malpractice.

Not entirely a surprise, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that legal malpractice plaintiff may not recover lost punitive damages from his defendant attorney. Damages, they decided, are limited to regular compensatory damages that could have been obtained from the underlying defendants. Details.

Here is a very interesting Legal Malpractice [LM] after a Medical Malpractice{MM} case which comments on the judgment rule in legal malpractice cases, as well as a unique New Jersey presumption. At the MM trial, plaintiff was unable to provide an expert; their expert had died, and no one else found a deviation. the LM…

The level of acrimony here is beyond belief. Legal malpractice complaint, counter-defamation law suit, malicious allegations. Try to figure out why and when this law suit started, and why the two parties have such animus. I can’t untangle the facts.Here is the article from the NYLJ. Details.

California will soon [?] require insurance,a good night’s sleep demands it now. what do you look for in legal malpractice insurance? Denny Thaxton of Clarislaw.com tells us. Details.

Law Com reports that the California legislature is considering mandatory Legal Malpractice insurance. 153,000 attorneys, and 20% do not have insurance. Here are the details.

Recently written about in Blog 702, the differences and similarities between Legal Malpractice and Medical Malpractice were discussed.. “Frank focuses on the differences beween medical malpractice litigation, where Frank says doctors often get held liable for making reasonable treatment decisions, and legal malpractice cases, where he says the lawyers get more slack.”

Ted Frank points out: “Yet, even with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, one almost never sees legal malpractice claims in a lost or settled case: no client protests that a deponent could have been prepared better; that a cross-examination should have been more (or less) aggressive; that the attorney’s brief-writing failed to present arguments as clearly as it could have; that an opening or closing argument was too dry for the jury; that a settlement failed to extract the maximum possible value; that the law firm’s failure to have a client’s discovery ready when it filed a suit in a rocket docket alienated a judge that then made adverse rulings.”
Continue Reading The “Business Judgment Rule” in Legal and Medical Malpractice

Law Com reports that: “A Miami federal jury has ordered a South Florida businessman to pay nearly $19 million in damages to an Italian family who claimed that it lost millions in an embezzlement scheme.

In separate litigation still pending in U.S. District Court in Miami, the family alleges that the Miami law firm of…