Legal Malpractice: Five Years To Lose The Case—Five Months For Myers & Company To Collect Policy Limits
We have a bias toward action. A lot of people want to admire the rocket. We want to launch it to see if it really climbs the 62 miles needed to enter space.
Attorneys don’t like suing other attorneys. But during my first five or ten years I got a lot of practice. No case was too small.
We don’t handle a lot of legal malpractice cases anymore. But sometimes we still get involved.
Attorney malpractices cases are often described as a case within a case. Kind of like Russian nesting dolls.
You have to prove that the attorney screwed up. Then you have to prove what the underlying case was worth (had it been competently handled).
Our client had been represented by a couple of well-known attorneys. For five years they worked on his brain injury case. Then the other side realized that the attorneys had missed the statute of limitations.
The client was crestfallen. That’s a lot of time and emotional energy.
We worked hammer and tongs on the case. Within five months we had it wrapped up.
Personal injury cases don’t get better with time. Legal malpractice cases are frequently the result of delay.
For better or worse, we have a bias toward action. And that bias frequently produces pretty amazing results.
Good results don't have to take a long time. To me the term "thorough" almost suggests spending time on things that don't matter. Like going through the motions.
We aren't performative.
Success is frequently about identifying the issues that really matter and then focusing on them. It's about signal versus noise.
So in this case, two claps for taking action. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Well done is better than well said.”