How Lawyers Can Manage Malpractice Lawsuits

Posted on: October 29, 2020 by Huntersure

The thought of legal malpractice lawsuits can throw an attorney off and fill them with fear regarding how they operate with their clients. Clients can sue lawyers for many reasons, including negligence and malpractice, but these lawsuits don’t get filed without clients having the right facts and elements in place.

When these malpractice lawsuits happen, lawyers should tread lightly and accurately to avoid falling into even harsher pitfalls, be they legal, professional, or financial. Here’s a better look at legal malpractice lawsuits and how to manage them.

Malpractice Lawsuits Against Lawyers

Clients review a lawyer’s actions with the ability to look back over everything with a clearer vision. Decisions that were considered reasonable and calculated at the time might look like mistakes in the long run. Clients don’t expect their lawyer to do everything perfectly, but lawyers should act consistently in their professional status and operate under a certain standard of care.

In basic terms, while mistakes happen, not everything is negligence or an intentional error by an attorney. It’s essential to see if the error a lawyer committed caused damage of some kind. This is usually the deciding factor to see if there was truly intent. Even if a lawyer made an obvious mistake, the mistake must have injured the client somehow.

Next, claimants must allege that the damages were substantial. This could be financial damage, emotional damage, or other kinds of losses. Legal malpractice cases are expensive and can drag on for a while, racking up enormous bills for all involved. For lawyers in the middle of a malpractice lawsuit, having lawyer professional liability helps provide them with the resources they need to keep costs and risks under control.

Managing Legal Malpractice Suits

To mitigate the legal, reputational, and financial fallout from a malpractice suit, it’s ideal to prevent these suits from happening in the first place. But since this isn’t entirely possible, lawyer clients can take the following steps once they have been notified of being hit with a malpractice lawsuit.

• Work with Insurer: As mentioned above, operating with lawyer professional liability is key. The quickest way to lose legal malpractice insurance coverage is to fail to notify the insurance carrier or fail to report a claim during the policy period. Many insurers include in the notice of provision of their policies to report a claim as soon as possible. Lawyers should alert their provider and confirm receipt of the notice.
• Always Ask for Help: Lawyers must seek out assistance from an attorney of their own who specializes in these kinds of lawsuits. Understandably, the personal nature and high stakes of a legal malpractice claim make it hard for the attorney in question to act reasonably. The safest and best course for the attorney hit with a claim is to step back and let an objective lawyer handle the case. At a minimum, this means allowing someone else in the legal field to assume responsibility for responding to a claim.
• Open and Keep Separate Files for the Malpractice Claim: Lawyers at the center of a suit should separate all material related to a claim into distinct paper and electronic files, separate from the client’s files. This includes any notes or other work generated among law practice members in response to a malpractice claim. The best way to go about this is to open a new client matter with the firm as the client. This ensures that the attorneys addressing a claim are not those who worked on a file, preventing them from potentially mishandling a case.

About Huntersure

Huntersure LLC is a full-service Managing General Agency that has provided insurance program administration for professional liability products to our partners across the United States since 2007. We specialize in providing insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our program features can cover small firms (grossing $2.5 million annually) to large corporations (grossing $25 million annually or more). We make doing business with us easy with our breadth and depth of knowledge of E&O insurance, our proprietary underwriting system that allows for responsive quoting, binding and policy issuance and tailored products to meet the needs of your insureds. Give us a call at (855) 585-

Posted in: Lawyer's professional liability insurance