Defense Judgment in Legal Malpractice Case

Attorney Jose Gonzalez secured a defense judgment for the firm in a legal malpractice case where plaintiff claimed that our attorney clients were negligent, breached their fiduciary duty and contract for legal services by dismissing an automobile driver in an underlying three car chain reaction accident case, which indisputably resulted in injury to plaintiff.  We argued that the “middle driver” was impacted from the rear driver and, as such, caused no independent injury to plaintiff. As such, our clients were not only correct in dismissing the middle driver, but had an ethical duty to do so. Plaintiff’s last settlement demand was $400,000. Over the course of four days, the court sustained hundreds of our objections to inadmissible testimony and documents. At the close of the plaintiff’s case-in-chief, we made a motion for judgment, which the court granted.  Given the court’s favorable rulings on the hundreds of objections, there was no admissible evidence from which the plaintiff established the prima facie elements of any of her causes of actions.