Many law offices wont accept legal malpractice cases. Many attorneys don’t want to sue other attorneys and the reputation of an attorney who sues other attorneys is not something that makes you friends in the
business. However, we do accept these cases to fight for clients that were denied the justice they sought because of their former counsel.
Legal malpractice cases are hard on clients. We understand that you had a case, you had an attorney and now everything has gone wrong. Now all of a sudden you must sue your attorney. You feel betrayed. You feel like your case did not matter. And worse yet…you now must find another attorney to sue your first one. We see a lot of people try to file their own legal malpractice case. Huge mistake. You will not be taken seriously by the Judge, the attorney you are suing or the attorney’s insurance carrier.
In most cases you will also have to hire an attorney expert witness to testify regarding the standard of care for the attorney (in other words, what the attorney should have done but did not).
Don’t forget that you also have to establish that you would have won your original case but for the attorney’s error. This isn’t easy to establish.
Let’s start with the easy cases. These are a missed statute of limitations, missed expert deadlines or failure to retain an expert, failure to respond to discovery resulting in sanctions, and even failure to appear at a hearing or trial.
After that, legal malpractice claims become more difficult because of something called the “strategic or tactical decision" defense. Basically, this means that if the attorney’s decision was reasonable at the time, it cannot be second guessed with hindsight. We receive a lot of calls to the effect that the caller’s prior attorney didn’t write well or didn’t argue well. Yet these are just strategic type decisions.
7432 W. Sahara Ave., Suite 101, Las Vegas, NV 89117