News & Blog

By Will Jordan Law360 reports on the dismissal of a legal malpractice case due to discovery abuses by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs alleged their attorneys incorrectly calculated the applicable statute of limitations for an underlying medical malpractice claim. After what appears to have been repeated failures to comply with the court’s discovery orders, including failing […]

By Will Jordan There’s an interesting article at law360.com about an ongoing legal malpractice lawsuit filed by the developers of a Native American casino project in Oklahoma. The developers brought suit in the fall of 2013, claiming the firm’s negligent representation resulted in a federal court granting a temporary injunction against the proposed casino. At […]

By Will Jordan It’s a quiet day in the world of legal malpractice court decisions . . . nothing of great interest for us to report. Sigh. So, we’ll take this opportunity to remember an important feature of the familiar case-within-a-case doctrine: the standard is objective, not subjective. Courts have recognized that the test under […]

By Will Jordan Imagine our delight when the words “Adnan Syed” popped up on our Facebook timeline yesterday. Six months after completing our binge of the Serial podcast, which told the tale of Adnan’s conviction for the murder of his high school classmate and ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, there finally is an update. And the […]

By Will Jordan Clients brought a legal malpractice action against their attorney, alleging the attorney failed to advise them that a claim against their home insurer had to be filed within one year of the date of the loss. The Court affirmed summary judgment in favor of the attorney, noting that the insurance policy expressly […]

By Will Jordan We’ve written about the continuous representation rule a few times on this blog. (See here and here). As the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky noted, the continuous representation rule tolls the statute of limitations on a legal malpractice claim “so long as the attorney continues to represent the […]

By Will Jordan Attorney agreed to represent Client in the underlying case, despite a potential conflict of interest about which he warned Client. Shortly after undertaking the representation, it became apparent that Attorney did, in fact, have a conflict. Attorney moved to withdraw from the representation and was relieved as counsel. Client, unhappy with the […]

By Will Jordan A lot of jurisdictions don’t have any law addressing the ability of a legal malpractice plaintiff to recover damages for emotional distress. But, just within the last couple of weeks, at least two courts have recognized that emotional distress damages generally are not recoverable in the context of a legal malpractice case. […]

By Will Jordan We spend most of our time on this blog talking about legal malpractice decisions in which the underlying matter is civil in nature, not criminal. But, it’s worth noting the difficulty a plaintiff faces when asserting legal malpractice arising from representation in a criminal case. While a plaintiff asserting a legal malpractice […]

By Will Jordan A couple of weeks ago, we discussed a recent decision out of New York in which the court held that the tolling of the statute of limitations pursuant to the continuous representation doctrine ends when the client signs a consent substitution of counsel. What about when the attorney unilaterally withdraws from the […]