If you were working with an attorney on a legal case and felt that their inexperience or mistakes led to you losing your case, it’s reasonable to want to look into filing a claim against them. Legal malpractice is a problem, and it does happen to some people.
If you want to make a legal malpractice claim, you’ll need strong evidence to support your lawsuit. You should be able to show how the attorney’s errors led to you losing a case or explain how their actions violated your rights as a client.
Legal malpractice can be tough to prove
Sometimes, legal malpractice can be difficult to prove. You may not know enough about the law to be sure that your attorney made an error, but you may suspect that they did based on their actions. You might not be sure what obligations they have to you as a client or if the way they handled your case was how another attorney would have.
In a legal malpractice claim, you’ll need to show that the attorney owed you a duty of care and that they breached that duty of care in some way. You may want to keep receipts showing that you paid a retainer fee or keep emails stating that they were working on your case. You may want to show that they were negligent or intentionally malicious towards you, for example, depending on your circumstances.
After showing that the attorney violated the duty of care owed to you, you also need to show that their actions led to damages. Those damages might be in the form of losing a case and not getting the economic support you needed, as an example.
Not all mistakes are malpractice
Mistakes sometimes happen, but they’re not all necessarily malpractice. If an attorney’s error didn’t play a significant role in you losing a case or not being able to make a claim against another party, then you may not have a case against them for those errors. This is something you’ll want to discuss with another attorney to get a second opinion, so you can decide if you’d like to pursue a legal malpractice case.