Lawyers Liability
Legal Malpractice
We’ve been defending the legal profession since we graduated from law school. Against legal malpractice claims filed by lawyers’ former clients, to be sure. But also against non-traditional but increasingly frequent claims by third-parties to the relationship, such as defamation, conspiracy, aiding-and-abetting, malicious prosecution, Fair Debt Collection and civil RICO.
And the lawyers that we’ve represented come from all walks of the legal profession: divorce; estate planners and probate litigators; commercial and residential real estate; criminal defense; intellectual property; professional malpractice; personal injury and medical malpractice; insurance and workers’ compensation defense; tax; labor and employment; immigration; municipal; commercial lending and transactions; bankruptcy.
Due to our reputation for success, some of the largest writers of legal malpractice insurance in the country, law firms with large self-insured retentions, and lawyers and law firms without any insurance at all retain Meyer Law Group to defend these claims and protect their bottom-line.
Legal Ethics
With more than twenty-five years of experience practicing before the ARDC, we have successfully defended lawyers at every stage of investigation and prosecution, including confidential investigations involving Himmel reports and mandated insufficient fund reports from banking institutions, contested hearings before the Hearing Board, and on appeal before the Review Board and the Illinois Supreme Court.
Risk Management
From our extensive defense of lawyers in legal malpractice claims and in ethics investigations, we have over the years witnessed some of the best “best practices” and, equally, some of the worst “worst practices.” We have thus developed a particular forte for advising lawyers on basic and not-so-basic law firm risk management protocols – from insurance procurement to conflicts advice to broad-strokes legal ethics and office procedures – to which any law firm, whether consisting of one lawyer or five hundred, should adhere.
Law Firm Dissolutions & Departures
The idea of attorney as fiduciary shouldn’t be foreign to any lawyer, but often enough lawyers forget that they may also be fiduciaries to their law firm and their partners. With this label comes a host of obligations that arise in the context of law firm dissolutions, or when a lawyer or an entire practice group departs one firm in favor of another.
We have represented both law firms and departing lawyers (sometimes entire practice groups) as they try to manage this process in a way that is least disruptive to the clients’ needs. Unfortunately, amicable partings are not always achieved, and we’re often retained to represent either the law firm or the departing lawyer when breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference claims arise between them.