Plaintiff was the wife in a divorce. Defendant Antokol & Coffin was the law firm who represented her. Her legal malpractice case turned on the lack of a second valuation witness. Law firm countercliams for legal fees. Legal malpractice action is dismissed on basis that plaintiff failed to present an affidavit from a second valuation witness which would have proven higner values. Attorney wins fee counterclaim which is then reversed on the basis that the attorney told the jury that the malpractice case had been dismissed too many times. 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 plaintiffs relied on a presumption that the use of an expert in an underlying case would have increased the success rate; if this is true, then the burden shifts to legal malpractice defendant to show it’s not true.

In dismissing the LM case, the Supreme Court of New Jersey determined that it was plaintiff’s burden to provide a medical expert’s affidavit in the LM case to show that there was a deviation. They still had none, and lost. Details.

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.

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 Pertnoy Solowsky & Allen helped the businessman, Edward Reizen, conceal a significant amount of the money.”

Recently it has been reported that the Pertnoy firm had “tampered” with published opinions by Judge Gold of Bankrupcy court, in the ExxonMobile case.