Seattle Legal Malpractice Lawyer

The Challenges of Proving Legal Malpractice

However, legal malpractice cases can be very difficult to win because they involve proving more than mere substandard representation. The standard of care for Washington attorneys requires them to fulfill “a duty to use that degree of skill, care, diligence, and knowledge possessed and used by a reasonable, careful, and prudent attorney in the State of Washington acting in the same or similar circumstances.” Unless a lawyer has held him or herself out to be a specialist in a given area of the law, he or she will not be required to do anything more than proceed in the manner that “a reasonable attorney” would.

Another of the legal elements of a legal malpractice case that often makes such cases particularly challenging is the causation requirement. To prevail, the Plaintiff in a legal malpractice case must prove that it is more likely true than not that he or she would have obtained a more favorable outcome in the underlying legal case. For most types of claims, this requires Plaintiff to prove that he or she would have won the underlying case in the absence of the attorney’s negligence, and to establish in monetary terms what the better result in the case that he or she would have received would have been. These challenges can make certain types of cases overwhelmingly difficult to prove legal malpractice, such as criminal defense cases, in which the requisite burden for a defendant to prove that a jury would have found him or her not guilty could easily prove insurmountable. In practical terms, proving a legal malpractice case is twice the amount of work of proving the original case, because the success of the claim depends upon the merits of the legal malpractice case itself and the separate but related merits of the case-within-a-case. To win, the Plaintiff’s attorney must successfully prove both.