Callahan & Fusco, LLC recently prevailed on a motion to dismiss a legal malpractice lawsuit in Palm Beach County, Florida circuit court.
Our client, a well-regarded South Florida law firm, secured a full defense verdict on behalf of its client. Despite this outstanding result, the law firm’s client sued, alleging negligence in the failure to secure attorney’s fees from offers of judgment which were deemed insufficient to serve as the basis of a fees claim by a circuit court.
The Plaintiff argued that he was unable to win a statutory fee claim because our client, despite winning a full defense verdict, was negligent in filing the fees claims. As support for this, Plaintiff attached the fees proposals and claims filed by our clients to the complaint, along with the circuit court order denying the fees claim and ruling the proposals for fees failed because they were ambiguous, contrary to the law which states any proposal seeking entitlement to fees must clearly state the scope of fees and litigation covered by the proposal. The Plaintiff’s Complaint did not allege that there was an appeal of the circuit court’s ruling and a final order; in fact, the evidence in the record showed Plaintiff had specifically instructed our client to not seek an appeal of the circuit court’s fees order.
After lengthy briefing and oral argument, the Palm Beach County circuit court agreed with Callahan & Fusco, LLC senior associate Neil W. Blackmon’s argument that Plaintiff had not established “redressable harm” in his pleading because he had pleaded merely the “possibility of negligence”, as opposed to actual negligence. The basis for this ruling was our argument that the Plaintiff attached court orders to his Complaint that were non-final orders that could be, and needed to be, appealed. We argued that the only way “litigational negligence” could be pled in a legal malpractice suit under Florida law is to show that an appellate court upheld the finding of the circuit court and as such, the Plaintiff’s inability to access fees was the result of attorney negligence, not judicial error. Callahan & Fusco, LLC successfully argued that in this case—it was not clear because this was an appealable order.
The Court granted the motion to dismiss, with the Judge’s ruling noting that he was particularly persuaded by the argument that Callahan & Fusco, LLC’s client likely would have prevailed on appeal, as the original circuit court judge found ambiguous an order that was quite clear. As such, the appeal mattered; and the Plaintiff had not established harm caused by attorney error in his pleading. This outstanding result ultimately led to the Plaintiff abandoning his pursuit of legal malpractice litigation against our client, a just reward for a law firm that secured a complete defense verdict.