Legal Malpractice Law Review : Professional Responsibility Case Summaries & Commentary : Bennett J. Wasserman : LegalMalpractice.com : Lawyer Malpractice & Legal Ethics

Today, we celebrate the 2nd anniversary of “going live”. At the same time, we just  welcomed the 200,000th visitor to our blog. The Legal Malpractice Law Review has become the #1 site for everything you need or want to know about legal malpractice.

We are grateful to all the Lawyers, litigants, Judges, Professional Liability Insurance professionals, law students, law professors, law clerks, even lay people who have come to visit and utilize our resources. While the overwhelming welcome we have received has been wonderful, we would love to receive your comments to help celebrate this landmark event. Just click the "Comments" button on the lower left of this post and send us a few nice words.

In our short history,  the American Bar Association’s Lawyers Professional Liability Committee took note of us and showcased this blog at its conference for 500+ legal malpractice lawyers and insurance industry executives, underwriters, brokers and claims professionals.

One guru of the legal malpractice bar-- whose treatise we would all would recognize, commented that when it comes to educating law students and practicing lawyers, the way we’re doing it at the Legal Malpractice Law Review, is now “the way to go”. A senior New Jersey Law Journal reporter called us “cutting edge.”

We are a totally web based blog, whose goal is to build an easily searchable archive of all of the most important sources and resources in the law governing lawyers. Over the past two years, we have become the “go to” place for law students, law clerks, judges and lawyers conducting legal research in the field.  We post  case summaries, hyperlinked to a copy of the full text court decision. Case summaries are researched and written by senior law students who are focused on studying legal malpractice law in a full semester law school course in the subject. Experienced legal malpractice practitioners and law professors edit the student’s work before posting.

Our archive of  legal malpractice cases covers the entire country and is easily accessible without any cost to our visitors, at any time, day or night, 24/7. All you need is an internet connection, from your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Droid or other smartphone. Our advanced word search engine on the left hand column will get you right to the cases or other resources you’re looking for. In court, in the law library, in your office or on the go, day or night, you know where to find us. We’re here. For you.

So, from the Editorial Board: Thanks for making this 2nd year so successful! And watch for even more in the coming year. 

Legal Malpractice Law Review

Ben Wasserman

Editor-in-Chief

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Previously, I sent your blog a note thanking you for the great information in the blog.

This morning the judge granted my motion for summary judgment to dismiss a legal malpractice case based upon the causation and reasonable settlement arguments I made,  based
upon the ... case law I found here.

Thank you again.

Aileen Cohen

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                           The  Editorial Board of the 

LEGAL MALPRACTICE LAW REVIEW

                TAKES GREAT PRIDE AND PLEASURE 

                       IN WELCOMING TODAY THE 

                             100,000 th 

                           VISITOR TO OUR BLOG. 

WE THANK ALL OF OUR READERS AND SUBSCRIBERS

FOR THIS GREAT VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN OUR WORK!

                                   January 3, 2011

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   Best Wishes for the Holiday Season.   

To celebrate, 

Legal Malpractice Law Review

   will take a breather...and we'll  try to catch our breaths

from all the phenomenal success we have had this year:

Almost 100,000 visitors!

We'll be back on Monday, January 3, 2011, with a whole new stack of

case summaries in every aspect of legal malpractice law.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

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FROM THE ENTIRE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE 

LEGAL MALPRACTICE LAW REVIEW

HAPPY THANKSGIVING  

TO ALL OUR VISITORS...

...AND THANK YOU TO THE MORE THAN

90,000 VISITORS WHO HAVE VISITED OUR

PAGES SINCE WE WENT LIVE. 

November 25, 2010

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Today we celebrate the 1st anniversary of “going live”.  In our first year,  we have welcomed more than 77,000 visitors to our blog. The Legal Malpractice Law Review has become the #1 site for everything you need or want to know about legal malpractice.

We are grateful to all the Lawyers, litigants, Judges, Professional Liability Insurance professionals, law students, law professors, even lay people who have come to visit and utilize our resources. While the overwhelming welcome we have received this past year has been wonderful, we would love to receive your comments to help celebrate this landmark event. Just click the "Comments" button on the lower left of this post and send us a few nice words. 

In April of this year, the American Bar Association’s Lawyers Professional Liability Committee took note of us and showcased this blog at its conference for 500+ legal malpractice lawyers and insurance industry executives, underwriters, brokers and claims professionals.

One guru of the legal malpractice bar-- whose name we all would recognize, commented that when it comes to educating law students and practicing lawyers, the way we’re doing it at the Legal Malpractice Law Review, is now “the way to go”. A busy Law Journal reporter  called us “cutting edge.” 

We are a totally web based blog whose goal it is to build an archive of all of the most important sources and resources in the law governing lawyers. In the past year, we have become the “go to” place for law students and lawyers conducting legal research in the field.  Every weekday we post a new case summary, hyperlinked to a copy of the full text court decision. Case summaries are researched and written by senior law students who are focused on studying legal malpractice law in a full semester law school course in the subject. Experienced legal malpractice practitioners and law professors edit the student’s work before posting.

Our archive of the most critical legal malpractice cases covers the entire country and is easily accessible without any cost to our visitors, at any time, day or night, 24/7. All you need is an internet connection, from your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Droid or other smartphone. Our advanced word search engine on the left hand column will get you right to the cases or  other resources you’re looking for.

So, in court, in the law library, in your office or on the go, day or night, you know where to find us. We’re here. For you.

So, from the Editorial Board: Thanks for making this 1st year so successful!

Legal Malpractice Law Review

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The Legal Malpractice Law Review  

is proud to celebrate its 6 month anniversary today 

and the

30,000th visit to its site

by a growing list of loyal readers. 

Thank you for your vote of confidence!

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                       The Legal Malpractice Law Review is pleased to announce that:  

1. Professor Susan Saab Fortney of Texas Tech University School of Law has joined our Editorial Board. Professor Fortney is co-author of LEGAL MALPRACTICE LAW: Problems and Prevention (Thomson/West, 2008), the first law school level casebook in its field.

2. Law Students in Texas Tech Law School’s legal malpractice course have joined with Hofstra Law School students to help build our archive of case summaries so as to provide an ongoing supply of content for readers of the Legal Malpractice Law Review.

3. Our list of outside content Contributors continues to grow,  with more and more lawyer professional liability practitioners from across the country wanting to contribute.

4. The Legal Malpractice Law Review  went live less than 6 month ago. We are  approaching 25,000 visits ("hits")  from new and repeat readers.

5. Legal Malpractice Law Review appears to have become the premier one-stop site for anything and everything pertaining to the law governing lawyers. 

Please let us know if there is any way we can make the Legal Malpractice Law Review better and more useful to you.  Just go to the "Contact Us" box to the left. 

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Let's take a break for the Thanksgiving holiday with some easy to read  classics from the

Lawyers' Professional Liability Committee of the American Bar Association

    Happy Thanksgiving!

     from

The Legal Malpractice Law Review

          Editorial Board

   Ben, Krishna and Claudia

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From Henry Gottlieb of the New Jersey Law Journal, October 28, 2009 (on line):

For students looking for interaction with authors and practitioners in a law review format, the cutting edge may be a new quasi-student online publication started by Bennett Wasserman, a New Jersey legal malpractice lawyer and an adjunct professor at Hofstra University School of Law in Hempstead, N.Y.

Started just two weeks ago, Wasserman's Legal Malpractice Law Review is a hybrid that could be called a "blawreview" — part blog, part law review. Students write digests of leading legal negligence cases, and the postings are open to comment. The site is for lawyers and insurance professionals, and rants by disgruntled litigants are going to be flamed quickly, the "rules of use" section of the site suggests.

Wasserman is counting on comments from a board of contributors he assembled that includes lawyers on all sides of the malpractice wars, such as plaintiffs' practitioner Glenn Bergenfield of Princeton, defense counsel Thomas Campion of Drinker Biddle in Morristown and pioneering legal ethics scholar Monroe Freedman, Hofstra Law's former dean.

Melissa Goldberg, one of the student contributors, is also on the staff of the Hofstra Law Review, where she spends a lot of time checking citations in articles. Not only does her work on the malpractice site have a more practical effect on readers, she says, it gives her an opportunity to have her name on published work.

"You are interacting with people you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to meet and you are getting your name on the Internet," she says. "If you Google your name, it comes right up. It's cool to have a presence on the Internet."

It also has helped widen her horizons. "I didn't even know until I got to law school that you could sue a lawyer," she says.

 

Editor's Note: Thank you to the New Jersey Law Journal for recognizing the uniqueness  and value of the Legal Malpractice Law Review. In the 10 days since we have gone live, we have had more than 4,200 "visits" and an abundance of congratulatory comments. Thank you all for your enthusiastic welcome.

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The purpose of the Legal Malpractice Law Review is very simple: To help make us all better lawyers.

Today, we lawyers are expected to adhere to  the highest levels of competence, diligence and honesty at the risk of being held accountable for substantial  money damages to clients and non-clients.    Our  law schools teach and test us on professional responsibility, i.e., legal ethics.  But very few  offer us a course in professional liability, i.e., legal malpractice. The two fields are distinct, yet both are essential for us if we are expected to deliver  high quality legal services. Just as  we  need to know about professional responsibility, we must also know about professional liability; and how to avoid it.

We're all busy lawyers. But now, through the simplicity and convenience of blog technology, Legal Malpractice Law Review allows us to quickly learn —through its one-minute case summaries, about the professional mistakes other lawyers have made.  We will also see how to avoid those mistakes and thus spare ourselves  from the  catastrophic risks of malpractice; not to mention how to protect our own clients from the harm they will  suffer from such mistakes. Over the years, we plan to build an on-line  archive of one-minute-case summaries for as many past and current court decisions we can find that touch on the substantive area of legal malpractice. In addition, we plan to post important resource materials such as standards, Restatement sections and Rules that pertain to legal malpractice.  We will also be able to participate in blog discussions on timely topics conducted  by well-known practitioners, insurance industry professionals, law school faculty and experts in the field.

I am so grateful to many who have made the Legal Malpractice Law Review a reality:  First, my Lawyer Malpractice students at Hofstra Law School, whose required research and writing assignments  provide most of the content for the one-minute-case summaries appearing in this blog. Since 1990, each of my students has inspired me to continue  to study, work in  and help to build this new substantive area of the law. The President, Dean and Law School faculty at Hofstra have served as a constant source of support to me, encouraging originality, innovation and practice-based relevance in legal education. The many lawyers and law firms-- from both the defense and plaintiff's bar,  throughout the country,  who have given me the privilege to serve as their legal malpractice and ethics consultant and expert witness in over 1000 fascinating cases. The many clients--from widows and orphans to publicly traded corporations and prominent law firms, who have entrusted me with representing their respective interests in legal malpractice cases for over  three decades. They all have provided me with a  continuing and generous supply of educational resources. And finally, to my wife and  partner in life  for the past 40+ years-- whose beauty, loyalty and pragmatism have given me nothing less than the world, and more.

It is my sincere hope that all members of the legal community will gain from this effort and that it will ultimately find its appropriate place in the ongoing quest to make us all better lawyers for the benefit of those who depend on our counsel.  

                                                                      Bennett J. Wasserman
                                                                      Editor

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