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…
Here, from the subscription Chicago Daily News is a snippet in which a high ranking Illinois State Police official has sued the State Attorney General for a sloppy defense of a trooper, or so the short blurb implies.
"An Illinois state police colonel has filed a legal-malpractice lawsuit against the state attorney general and…
