If you’ve had an experience with a legal professional that didn’t quite feel right to you, you might wonder if you have any legal recourse available to you. You may feel as though your representation was inadequate, your lawyer was inattentive, or that every legal avenue available to you was not explored. Just being dissatisfied with the outcome of your case probably doesn’t qualify for legal malpractice, but if and when an attorney does not follow the standards of ethical and professional conduct, the case may justify a claim of legal malpractice.
If an attorney has acted negligently and that negligence has caused you damages, it may warrant a claim of legal malpractice. To win your claim, you would need to demonstrate that your attorney negligently violated the standard of care all attorneys should provide to their clients, and that you were unable to recover potential damages, or paid extraneous damages, as a result.
The claim will probably require you to prove negligence on the part of the attorney involved. To prove this, you need to show that:
· The attorney had a duty to provide competent and skillful representation
This may be the easiest of the four elements to prove. In most cases, if an attorney-client relationship exists, you are owed a duty of care. So if you hired a lawyer to protect you and your interests, you’ve proven this element.
· The attorney breached their duty by acting carelessly or by making a mistake
Proving carelessness is not always easy. Catching an obvious example of a mistake — a mistake significant enough to lose a case — is also a challenge. Missing deadlines and failing to provide adequate documentation can, in certain cases, be considered sufficient to prove an actionable mistake. These mistakes have to be clear, obvious, and easy to prove that they are beyond a difference in representative discretion – this is why something like missing a deadline is a good example – this is a basic responsibility of your attorney, and not something that could be considered a difference of opinion or approach.
· The attorney’s breach caused you an injury or harm
Showing that a case was lost due to this mistake or careless behavior requires, in essence, re-litigating the case. The attorney should always be acting in the best interests of his or her client. If a mistake or carelessness by your attorney caused you to have to pay damages beyond what should have happened in the case, or prevented you from filing an appeal that could have reduced the damages in your case, you might be able to make a case for legal malpractice. Additionally, if your attorney failed to inform you of a routine or typical course of action that could have mitigated your financial penalty in a case, you might be able to make a persuasive case for legal malpractice.
· The harm caused a financial loss
Financial losses can take the form of losing an award judgement in a civil suit. In can also appear as lost wages, or as payments made for legal services that did not live up to the promise of “competent and skillful representation.” In any of these cases, if you can make a convincing connection between the financial loss on your part, and the actions or failure to act on the part of your attorney, you are well on your way to making a case for legal malpractice.
If you’re concerned about a result in a lawsuit, and you think you might have grounds to make a case for legal malpractice, please get in touch with us here at Clements, Taylor, Butkovich & Cohen LPA, Co. We have years of experience representing clients who have been harmed by all types of negligence, from injuries on the job to failures of representation by other attorneys. We’re here to hear from you, help you evaluate the merits of the experience you’ve had, and advocate for you if your rights and interests have not been adequately protected.