Douglas Chandler Provides Commentary for the Daily Report
The Daily Report sought Douglas Chandler’s viewpoints for their March 29 article on the Losey v. Prieto legal malpractice case (12EV104260): “Ex-Client Sues Lawyers for $1.3M.” Click here to view the full article and Douglas’ comments.
Excerpt from the Daily Report article:
Douglas V. Chandler, who has handled numerous legal malpractice and attorney discipline cases but is not involved in Losey’s dispute with his lawyers, agreed to review the filings at the Daily Report’s request.
Chandler disagrees with Losey’s assertion that arbitration agreements in attorney-client contracts are either rare or necessarily problematic, and he said that the arguments suggesting that such a clause is inherently barred by law seem shaky.
“I think [the defense attorneys] are right that it’s completely distinguishable from the Harris case, where the attorney and his son-in-law clients were co-defendants in the litigation,” he said. “What is interesting to me is that the lawyers felt justified in taking a contingency fee on a contingency that had not been realized.”
Whether the allegations of fraud and other tortuous actions may void the agreement entirely is an issue for the court, he said.
“It seems that it would depend factually on the representations the lawyers made to the client when they came to the prison and allegedly told him he had to sign the agreement,” Chandler said. “[Brown] did an awesome job of pleading this, but we still don’t know what was actually said, and he wants to get into discovery to ferret out those facts. It’s a fascinating case.”
Click here to view the full article.
