Questions to Ask Your Legal Malpractice Lawyer
Sometimes attorneys make mistakes with their clients’ cases, and those mistakes can result in a lot of harm. This professional failure by a lawyer is called legal malpractice.
You have a right to recover remedies from an attorney after their malpractice causes losses in your life, but how do you ensure that an attorney is held fully responsible for their misconduct? Hiring an experienced malpractice lawyer is the key to a successful malpractice case.
If you were burned by a lawyer once before, we know you want to be armed with the right questions to ask a legal malpractice lawyer before you hire them.
Below, we cover questions you should ask during a consultation with a malpractice attorney. And once you are ready to hire, you should speak with a knowledgeable Connecticut legal malpractice lawyer at StangerLaw LLC. We have been in practice for decades, and we make sure our clients are informed and respected at every step of a legal claim.
Please call (860) 561-0651 or send an online message today to learn how we can help you.
How to Hire a Legal Malpractice Lawyer
Before hiring any attorney, you should have specific information about that attorney’s practice, background, and methods. Asking a legal malpractice lawyer questions can help you determine whether you have met the correct attorney to handle your case. Read on for crucial questions you can use to weed out which attorney is best for your needs.
Ask How Long They Have Been Handling Legal Malpractice Cases
Experience is one of the best indicators of which professional is the right one to handle a claim as complex and stressful as a legal malpractice claim. The more years your malpractice attorney has been in practice and the more cases they have handled, the more likely they have the tools necessary to hold a negligent legal professional accountable. Once you know how many cases an attorney has worked on, you should ask the following questions.
Ask Whether They Have Experience with the Type of Malpractice in Your Case
The legal field is diverse, filled with a lot of starkly different and complex subjects. Often, practicing attorneys focus on one area or only a handful of legal disciplines while leaving other legal matters to different professionals in the field.
Rule 1.3 of the Rules of Professional Conduct requires that attorneys be diligent in their practice, which means that a lawyer should take “whatever lawful and ethical measures are required to vindicate a client’s cause or endeavor.” To follow this rule and avoid malpractice, a lawyer should have an adequate understanding of the area of law that covers their client’s case, and so should a malpractice attorney who initiates a malpractice action against that lawyer.
When it comes to claims of legal malpractice, questions you ask your malpractice attorney should include whether they are familiar with the area of law your former lawyer practiced. A malpractice attorney who knows the same area of the law can more easily recognize when another attorney has made a mistake in a case.
Ask How Much Malpractice Insurance They Carry
You should have as much protection as possible against malpractice from any attorney you hire (even your malpractice lawyer). An important form of protection for you and your attorney is malpractice insurance.
Ask What Their Litigation-to-Settlement Ratio Is
Not every legal action needs to or should be resolved in the same way. Sometimes litigation is better for a case, and sometimes settlement is the best option. When interviewing a malpractice lawyer, ask how often they take a case to trial and how often they settle a case.
If an advocate’s track record is heavy on litigation, they might not understand when settlement is the best use of a client’s time and resources. On average, about 95% of cases—or 19 out of 20—settle before trial. The key is going the distance with the available evidence and information to get a reasonable settlement. Don’t settle too early.
B you come to any conclusions about their track record, one of the questions to ask an attorney about their settlement and litigation history is why they lean in one direction over the other. Sometimes an attorney has a good reason for their pattern of resolving cases, and you should know what that is.
Ask How Much Your Case Is Worth
Experienced attorneys can take a look at the facts of your case after getting all the information and give you a ballpark figure of how much you could expect to recover in a legal proceeding or settlement negotiation.
An attorney’s ability to give you this figure is evidence of their experience. Also, an initial assessment of your case’s value can help you determine whether it is worth it to pursue your malpractice claim. Of course, the value of your case can change as it progresses and you participate in discovery, so keep that in mind.
Reach Out to a Connecticut Legal Malpractice Lawyer Today
At StangerLaw, our experienced legal team is passionate about holding trusted legal professionals accountable for the ways they have mishandled their clients’ cases. Our experience goes back to 1977. We keep the lines of communication open with our clients, so they know they are safe with us. Call (860) 561-0651 or contact us online to schedule a consultation.
