One type of legal malpractice could be if your lawyer accidentally filed your case in the wrong location or the wrong court.
This could happen geographically. Perhaps your court case needs to be filed in New York, but your lawyer filed the case in New Jersey. This could mean that the court doesn’t actually have jurisdiction, and your lawyer needs to redo the paperwork and file it correctly in the proper court.
Another example is if your lawyer files your case in state court when it should have been filed in federal court. Even if both courts are located within the same geographical location, it could still be a significant error on your end.
What happens next?
Exactly what happens depends on the case. For instance, the other party may ask to transfer the case. This could get it moved to a different court, so you need to be very clear about where your next hearings will actually be. In some cases, the defendants will ask the court to dismiss the case entirely and refuse to proceed with it.
Either way, this means that your lawyer needs to take additional steps. You may have to refile the case and start the process over. This could have a major impact on the outcome. For instance, if there’s a statute of limitations of just one year and your case spends months sitting in the wrong court before you realize the error, you could potentially miss that statute of limitations before your lawyer gets the case filed in the correct court. Even though you may have won your case based on the evidence you have, you may end up losing it because of your lawyer’s mistake.
In a scenario like this, it’s very important for you to understand all of the legal options you have, as your lawyer’s mistake could have caused you severe financial harm.