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- 503.850.9995
- 503.850.9995
You hired an attorney to protect your interests. Instead, they made it worse.
Attorney malpractice cases are different from most legal claims, and not just because the defendant happens to be a lawyer. They are different because the harm is often invisible at first. You trusted someone, you followed their advice, and somewhere along the way something went wrong that you may not have even recognized as a mistake until it was too late to fix it.
If you are trying to figure out whether what happened to you qualifies as malpractice, this page will help you think through it.
Malpractice does not mean your attorney lost your case or that you are unhappy with how things turned out. Attorneys make judgment calls constantly, and not every call works out. A bad result is not automatically a legal claim.
What malpractice means is that your attorney failed to meet the basic standard of competence that the profession requires, and that failure cost you something you would otherwise have had.
To have a viable claim, four things generally need to be true:
All four need to be present. If one is missing, the claim typically does not hold up.
Attorney malpractice takes many forms. Some of the most common include:
Missed deadlines
A statute of limitations expires, a filing is late, or a critical deadline is blown entirely. This is one of the most clear-cut forms of malpractice because the harm is usually undeniable.
Inadequate investigation
An attorney settles a case, advises a client, or lets a matter proceed without properly investigating the facts. Decisions made on incomplete information can devastate a case.
Bad legal advice
An attorney gives incorrect guidance that leads a client to take a position, sign an agreement, or make a decision they would not have made with accurate information.
Settlement without authorization
An attorney resolves a matter or agrees to terms without the client’s knowledge or consent. This happens more often than it should.
Conflict of interest
An attorney represents parties with competing interests, or has a personal stake in the outcome that was never disclosed.
Mishandling funds
Client money is mismanaged, misused, or simply not accounted for properly.
To win an attorney malpractice case, you essentially have to win two cases at once.
First, you have to prove the attorney was negligent. Then you have to prove that if they had not been negligent, you would have achieved a better outcome in the underlying matter. Lawyers call this the case within a case, and it is what makes malpractice claims uniquely demanding.
It requires an attorney who can evaluate what went wrong in your original legal matter, understand what should have happened, and build a new case around the gap between those two things. That is work that draws on a broad base of civil litigation experience, which is exactly what Adam brings to these cases.
Most attorneys do not handle malpractice claims against other attorneys. Some find it uncomfortable. Others simply do not have the litigation background to pursue them effectively.
Adam takes these cases because he believes that being an attorney should mean something, and when it does not, there should be a real consequence. He has the civil litigation experience to evaluate them honestly and the trial background to take them as far as they need to go.
He will also tell you directly if your situation does not rise to the level of a viable claim. Not every bad experience with an attorney is malpractice, and you deserve a straight answer.