Courtesy of Judicial Reports, a cautionary tale for lawyers: be careful when you accept litigious clients. The law firm of Wallace & Minchenberg wasn’t, and it came back to bite them:
Bennett A. Cohen kept getting hurt in elevators — or so he claimed. The lawyers he hired to exact compensation from the culprits responsible for the injuries he allegedly sustained in four elevator mishaps between 1989 and 1992 must have suspected that their litigious client might eventually turn on them, as he did. When the last of the elevator tort claims collapsed, Cohen sued the law firm for malpractice for allegedly mishandling his slam-dunk tort suits.
A lower court in Brooklyn refused to dismiss Cohen’s suits, but the Appellate Division said that law firms can’t be guilty of malpractice for failing to properly prosecute cases without any merit to begin with.
I’m sure that’s of great comfort to the elevator maintenance companies who were originally sued by the law firm on behalf of Cohen.
(Too bad Cohen was representing himself pro se in his lawsuit against Wallace & Minchenberg. Otherwise he could have sued the lawyers who represented him in this lawsuit for failing to win against his former lawyers.)
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