Legal Malpractice

Attorneys Change Firms...How Does tha Affect the Client in Legal Malpractice?

By (Andrew Lavoott Bluestone)

The Law sites are consistently filled with stories of partners leaving firm A for firm B, and sometimes taking assoicates with them.  Law firms fold and are re-cast as new firms.  How does this restelss movement affect legal malpractice clients?

In The New Kayak Pool Corp. v Kavinoky Cook Llp ;2010 NY Slip Op 05176 ;Decided on June 11, 2010 ;Appellate Division, Fourth Department we see the Third Department's short-form answer. 
 

"Plaintiffs commenced this legal malpractice action seeking damages arising from defendants' alleged malpractice in failing to ascertain the existence of insurance coverage for the parties sued by plaintiffs in the underlying trademark infringement action. The same attorney represented plaintiffs throughout the course of that action. That attorney began representing plaintiffs in 1999 when he was a partner in defendant Kavinoky Cook LLP (Kavinoky). When he subsequently joined defendant Hodgson Russ, LLP (Hodgson), plaintiffs executed a consent to change attorney form in June 2003, thereby substituting Hodgson for Kavinoky as plaintiffs' attorney of record in the underlying action. That action settled in February 2004 and the instant action was commenced in January 2007.

Supreme Court properly denied the motion of Kavinoky seeking summary judgment dismissing the amended complaint and cross claims against it. Kavinoky contends that the action against it is time-barred because it was commenced more than three years after the attorney in question left Kavinoky and the consent to change attorney form was executed by plaintiffs (see CPLR 214 [6]). We reject that contention inasmuch as the statute of limitations was tolled by the doctrine of continuous representation during the time that the same attorney represented plaintiffs in the underlying action (see [*2]Waggoner v Caruso, 68 AD3d 1, 7, affd ___ NY3d ___ [May 11, 2010]; HNH Intl., Ltd. v Pryor Cashman Sherman & Flynn LLP, 63 AD3d 534, 535)"
 

Full post as published by New York Attorney Malpractice Blog on June 23, 2010 (boomark / email).