Did Your Attorney Fail to Refer You to the Proper Legal Expert?

Legal malpractice in the context of failing to refer you to an expert or a qualified attorney in your area of need. Good morning. My name is Neil Burns. I'm an attorney here along with my partner, Roshan Jain. We represent victims of legal malpractice and personal injury. We've been in this building since 1987 here at 6 Beacon Street.

And I've been asked to talk about when an attorney fails to refer you on. And the best example is someone that doesn't do personal injury, but gets a case where it's a rear ender and they say, oh, this should be easy, I can figure this out. And they can't. It's complicated. It sounds easy. There's a minimal policy, you have a broken leg, but there's PIP, there's, which is personal injury protection, there's liens from MassHealth, from Blue Cross, from other places.

These have to be dealt with and negotiated frequently, the insurance companies want a permanency evaluation. It's a complicated case, even if it seems simple. So you don't have to be an expert at everything, but you have to know what you're doing. If you're going to represent a client and you're going to tell the client that you have some level of experience, some level of confidence, some level of confidence in being able to do it.

And if you're not competent, you shouldn't be confident. So what do we do? We look at whether the attorney did have a level of competence, whether the attorney did have the ability to represent you in that area? And if they didn't, why didn't they refer you on? What was going on with respect to your case that they couldn't say, yeah, this is beyond our level of expertise.

And again, it doesn't just happen with personal injury. It happens all the time. If it happens when attorneys screw things up and they think they can fix it, although they can't, maybe because of the law or the contract or the timeline. If you are a victim of legal malpractice, if your lawyer failed to forward your case, recommend that you hire someone else, and you were damaged, you have significant damages because your lawyer didn't know what he or she was doing, give us a call.

Call Burns and Jain. It's a free initial consultation. Now, let me preface this by saying many times clients call and say, you know, I had a divorce trial and I only got 40 percent instead of 60 percent or I got 50 percent I should have gotten 60%. I mean, these are not cases where there are damages that we can measure, that are clear, that show incompetence, but there are a lot of times where there is incompetence.

A divorce lawyer, for example, who says we'll wing it when it comes time to evaluating the other party's business and you can't do that. Or showing up for a trial and not having witnesses subpoenaed, not having experts. There are many instances where we can just say they should have had this level of expertise or they should have had a lawyer that really knew what they were doing.

They didn't file a particular claim. Call Burns and Jain if you think you've been wronged, if you think your lawyer fell below the standard. It's a free initial consultation. 617-227-7423. Thank you.