The grounds on which a plaintiff may pursue a malpractice claim against an attorney with whom there was no attorney-client relationship are exceedingly narrow.

The New Jersey Appellate Division affirmed a decision dismissing a complex legal malpractice action arising out of an underlying first-party coverage action in the U.S. District Court that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars in building damage caused by Superstorm Sandy.

Plaintiffs alleged claims for legal malpractice in connection to the defendants’ interaction with Morris Properties and Ms. Morris in the underlying lawsuit, which concerned the plaintiffs’ right to recover from West American Insurance Company as a result of purported damage suffered on October 29, 2012, from Superstorm Sandy. At the close of discovery, a motion for summary judgment was filed on behalf of the defendants asserting that an order for dismissal should be entered. In granting the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, the trial court held that: (1) the plaintiffs’ expert report was lacking in the damages analysis explanation; (2) no individual attorney-client relationship existed between Ms. Morris and the defendants to confer standing to Ms. Morris to maintain an individual legal malpractice claim; and (3) the plaintiffs’ allegations that the defendants acted with willful and wanton disregard towards them to support a punitive damages claim were not supported by the record. 

Upon affirming the trial court’s decision, the Appellate Division, reviewing de novo the grant of summary judgment, held that the plaintiffs had not established proximate cause as a matter of law and that expert testimony was necessary to prove proximate causation and damages. The causal relationship between the defendants’ alleged malpractice and the plaintiffs’ asserted loss was not so obvious that the trier of fact could have resolved the issue as a matter of common knowledge without the assistance of expert testimony. The court held that the plaintiffs’ expert’s opinion was an impermissible net opinion, with no evidential weight, since the expert failed to explain the why and wherefore behind the opinion.

This decision is key to many areas of practice since the Appellate Division, in affirming the trial court’s order granting summary judgment, opined on many thorny aspects of litigation, including the parameters of expert reports in legal malpractice claims and the extent that a party can maintain an individual legal malpractice claim when no attorney-client relationship exists. The Appellate Division carefully scrutinized when an attorney owes a duty to a non-client and held, consistent with established precedent, that the grounds on which any plaintiff may pursue a malpractice claim against an attorney with whom there is no attorney-client relationship are exceedingly narrow. See, Green v. Morgan Props., 215 N.J. 431, 458 (2013); see also, Banco Popular N. Am. v. Gandi, 184 N.J. 161, 182-83 (2005); Petrillo v. Bachenberg, 139 N.J. 472, 474 (1995). 

_{Case Law Alerts, 2nd Quarter, April 2023 is prepared by Marshall Dennehey to provide information on recent developments of interest to our readers. This publication is not intended to provide legal advice for a specific situation or to create an attorney-client relationship. Copyright © 2023 Marshall Dennehey, all rights reserved. This article may not be reprinted without the express written permission of our firm.}