To win a legal malpractice case against your lawyer, you need a lawyer not only
experienced in winning legal malpractice cases, but also in a wide variety of other types of
claims. A legal malpractice case is not limited to a trial to prove that your lawyer did a poor job,
and failed to meet the required professional standards. In order to recover, your legal malpractice
attorney must also convince a jury that if the original lawyer had properly handled the case, you
would have won. This is frequently referred to as “the case within a case.”

This means that in hiring a lawyer for a legal malpractice case it is important to
understand what the lawyer’s background is, not only in legal malpractice, but in the type of case
in which you are originally involved. For example, our firm obtained a $1.75 million dollar
recovery for a woman in North Jersey whose original lawyer lost a medical malpractice case
because he did not understand the client’s medical chart and he sued the wrong doctor.
Specifically, the woman was originally hospitalized for an elective total knee replacement. As a
result of the surgery, she developed an umbilical hernia which was strangling her right colon
causing significant necrosis or/death of cells. The hospital delayed in performing emergency
surgery and as a result, the woman sustained severe and permanent damages to her intestinal and
digestive tract. Following the surgery, she lived a life of pain, was unable to properly digest her
food, and spent more time in the hospital than she did at home with her grandchildren.

The original case was lost because the original lawyer sued the wrong doctor. Incredibly,
the argument that convinced the jury to find against the woman was that they found that her
lawyer attributed the mistake of the doctor, in delaying the treatment of the hernia, to the wrong
doctor.

Our firm brought a claim against the lawyer for legal malpractice in suing the wrong
doctor. If it had not been for our extensive medical malpractice experience, we could not have
obtained a successful result for our client. The message is that if you are dissatisfied with the job
that a lawyer did and think that the lawyer committed malpractice, your new lawyer must not
only be a specialist in legal malpractice but also in the underlying case.

Our firm is currently litigating legal malpractice claims involving underlying cases of
medical malpractice, school financing, police pension matters, and residential construction.
Should you have occasion to need a legal malpractice attorney, do not forget to discuss with the
attorney, before retention, what the lawyer’s experience is, not only in legal malpractice, but in
whatever type of case you originally had.

Visit our website for more information on New Jersey Legal Malpractice.