As a Floridian resident who depended on a legal professional to get you through a tough situation, it’s normal to feel betrayed and hurt if they fail to do so. This is especially true if you feel like your loss stemmed from negligent actions on their part. However, there are still options for you. One is to pursue a legal malpractice suit.
According to FindLaw, you need to establish a number of different factors in order to pursue legal malpractice caused by negligence. You must first provide four things. Number one is that the lawyer in question owed a duty to provide you with skillful and competent representation. Secondly, that lawyer must have breached that duty. This could be because they made a mistake, or because they behaved in a careless way.
The next two factors deal with how that mistake has affected you. In order to pursue the case, the breach must have directly caused you harm in some way. This falls into two categories: harm and injury, or financial loss. As an example, if a lawyer misrepresented you in court and you lost the case and therefore had to pay a hefty fine, this is considered financial loss due to negligence.
The hardest part to prove, however, is causation. You must be able to show that if the negligent action had not occurred, you would have won your case. Because of how difficult this is to prove, it’s important to have a lawyer on your side who understands the ins and outs of malpractice cases among lawyers. Consider speaking to one about your case today.