When I started to work with the city, I realized that I was going to be working alongside our attorneys every single day. While I was a little nervous around them at first, we quickly became friends and all of that anxiety melted away. It was really neat to see how many different subjects they could handle, and I realized just how necessary they were for helping me to manage various daily occurrences. On this website, I thought it would be really great to start talking about how to work with lawyers, and what it might mean for you and your family if you seek legal advice early.
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Working With Lawyers Every Day
3 Common Legal Malpractice Claims And Why They Occur
Cassandra Stone
When you reach out to an attorney for help, you expect to receive reliable, competent advice and assistance. When an attorney's performance falls beneath a certain standard of care, you may find yourself worse off than when you started!
Here are three of the most common reasons that people find themselves pursuing legal malpractice claims and why they occur.
1. Your attorney didn't know the law—or didn't properly apply it.
This is the number one thing clients expect from an attorney. It's generally why they're seeking out an attorney's services in the first place!
However, the law is a big field and attorneys often specialize in one or two areas of practice. If an attorney takes a case out of his or her area of expertise, he or she may be risking the client's future. It's easy to overlook a statute or misinterpret a law that's vital to a case—and the results can be disastrous (particularly if it happens in court). Your case can even be dismissed, leaving you without hope of recovery for your losses.
2. Your attorney missed an important deadline.
Attorneys seldom handle one case at a time; they usually have dozens of cases that are being worked simultaneously. It's easy enough for an attorney to get slightly off-track when it comes to deadlines—but that can be a disaster for a client.
Take, for example, the recent case of a well-known Dallas attorney who missed the deadline to accept a $250,000 settlement offer from a personal injury victim by 41 minutes. That turned into a jury verdict for $5.5 million against the attorney's client, a small trucking company. The client is now suing the attorney for malpractice for his untimely slip-up.
3. Your attorney did an inadequate job of discovery.
Discovery, the process of uncovering and evaluating all of the important information in a case, is at the center of every legal case. When an attorney doesn't do his or her duty regarding discovery, that can seriously disadvantage a client. For example, imagine that you're divorcing your spouse. Your attorney advises you to settle for a fairly small sum—without fully investigating the actual value of your spouse's business. You could end up with far less than you should to secure your future.
Something like that can happen easily when an attorney takes on too big of a caseload to be able to give each client's case the proper attention.
It can be hard to tell if you're just the unlucky party in a lawsuit or the victim of an attorney's malpractice. Talk your situation over with a legal malpractice attorney to be sure.
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