Jones Motor Co. v. Holtkamp, Liese, Beckemeier & Childress, PC, 197 F. 3d 1190 (7th Cir. 1999)
7th Cir. IL: Underlying personal injury lawsuit
Student Contributor: Clem Dunham
Facts: The underlying suit had been filed in a state court in St. Clair County and assigned to a judge who we are told, and accept for purposes of deciding this appeal, has the reputation of favoring plaintiffs in personal injury suits. Jones’s lawyers negligently failed to make a timely effective request for a jury because they failed to accompany the request with payment of the fee for a jury trial. As a result the case was tried to the judge, who entered a judgment of $2.8 million for the plaintiff; the suit was then settled for $2.5 million. In the present case, the malpractice case, Jones tendered the opinion of an experienced lawyer in St. Clair County that had the case been tried to a jury, the verdict would have been in the neighborhood of $500,000. Jones and its insurer, which paid a part of the $2.5 million settlement, are suing for the $2 million difference.
Issue: Can the loss of a procedural advantage give rise to a malpractice suit even if the advantage was not essential to the protection of the client’s substantive rights?
Ruling: No. A malpractice plaintiff cannot prevail merely by showing that his claim which his lawyer booted, though baseless, had some nuisance value. To impose malpractice liability for booting a nuisance suit would—like deeming a plaintiff who obtains a nuisance settlement a prevailing party for purposes of entitlement to an award of attorneys’ fees, which courts also refuse to do, simply encourage nuisance suits, of which we have enough already. There is a difference, however, between saying that a claim can be meritorious without its being certain to prevail at trial and saying that one of the parties would have done better than the other, had it not been for the negligence of his lawyer, regardless of the relative merits of the parties’ positions. We hesitate to rule out the possibility of convincing an Illinois court to allow a malpractice suit to go forward on the basis of an argument that the plaintiff lost a procedural entitlement even though it was not an entitlement necessary to avert an unjust outcome. But given the uncertainty of harm we think the plaintiff in such a case must do more than the plaintiffs have done here to show that they can prove damages to a reasonable certainty.
Lesson: Even though a client may be correct in asserting that an advantage was lost by its lawyer’s failure to capitalize on a procedural entitlement; courts in Illinois will not permit a malpractice claim to go forward on this theory unless, the plaintiff can prove damages to a reasonable certainty.