[Cite as New Destiny Treatment Ctr., Inc. v. Wheeler, 129 Ohio St.3d 39, 2011-Ohio-2266.] 

NEW DESTINY TREATMENT CENTER, INC., ET AL., APPELLEES, v. WHEELER 

ET AL., APPELLANTS. 

[Cite as New Destiny Treatment Ctr., Inc. v. Wheeler, 

129 Ohio St.3d 39, 2011-Ohio-2266.] 

Legal-malpractice claim — Attorney-client relationship — Party hiring counsel 

on behalf of a corporation must have authority to do so. 

(No. 2010-0298 — Submitted February 15, 2011 — Decided May 18, 2011.) 

APPEAL from the Court of Appeals for Summit County, 

No. 24404, 2009-Ohio-6956. 

__________________ 

 O’DONNELL, J. 

{¶ 1} Attorney E. Marie Wheeler and the law firm of Roderick Linton, 

L.L.P., appeal from a decision of the Ninth District Court of Appeals reversing a 

grant of summary judgment entered in their favor in a legal malpractice action 

brought against them by New Destiny Treatment Center, Inc., and Christian 

Brotherhood Newsletter, both nonprofit corporations and successors to the 

Barberton Rescue Mission, Inc. The malpractice case arose from the 

representation of a dissident member of the board of trustees who tried to regain 

control of the corporation. The issue that concerns us in this case is whether 

attorneys who were retained by a dissident member of a nonprofit corporation’s 

board of trustees, and who assisted the dissident in temporarily taking control of 

the corporation, may subsequently be sued by the corporation for malpractice. 

The answer is no, because no attorney-client relationship existed between the 

attorney and the corporation. 

{¶ 2} Here, Wheeler and the law firm of Roderick Linton represented 

only the dissident trustee and took action on behalf of the corporation as 
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instructed by the dissident. No attorney-client relationship ever existed between 

the corporation and the attorney or the law firm. Therefore, there is no basis for 

the corporation to maintain a cause of action for legal malpractice against either. 

Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and reinstate the 

grant of summary judgment entered in favor of Wheeler and the law firm of 

Roderick Linton. 

Facts and Procedural History 

{¶ 3} New Destiny Treatment Center, Inc., is a nonprofit corporation 

located in Barberton, Ohio. New Destiny and the Christian Brotherhood 

Newsletter were originally organized as a single nonprofit corporation known as 

the Barberton Rescue Mission, Inc., which operated a rehabilitation facility for 

people with substance-abuse problems and provided a mutual aid program to 

assist those who subscribed to its Christian newsletter in paying their uninsured 

medical expenses. 

{¶ 4} In the late 1990s, the Internal Revenue Service, the Ohio attorney 

general, and the Summit County prosecuting attorney began investigating whether 

Reverend Bruce Hawthorn, the founder and president of the Mission, had abused 

the Mission’s tax-exempt status by diverting funds designated for a charitable 

purpose to his personal use and the use of friends and relatives. 

{¶ 5} Once he became aware of these investigations, Hawthorn invited 

Reverend Howard Russell and Reverend Richard Lupton to join the Mission’s 

board of trustees in 1999 to make it appear that the Mission had an independent, 

rather than a family, board. Russell became chairman and Lupton became 

secretary of the board, and they discovered that the Mission had fallen as much as 

$35 to $40 million behind in paying its subscriber’s medical bills, even though the 

newsletter generated $3 to $4 million per month in charitable contributions. The 

board retained the law firm of Vorys, Sater, Seymour & Pease, L.L.P., as legal 
January Term, 2011 

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counsel in response to the investigations of the Mission’s tax-exempt status and of 

Hawthorn’s alleged misuse of charitable funds. 

{¶ 6} When a majority of the members of the board of trustees became 

concerned that Hawthorn’s leadership threatened the continued existence of the 

ministry, the board placed Hawthorn on a six-month leave of absence from his 

position controlling the daily activities of the ministry. It appointed Dan Beers, 

Hawthorn’s nephew, as executive director of the Mission and assigned 

Hawthorn’s duties to him; the minutes of a board meeting reflect that Beers 

resigned his position as a member of the board of trustees when he became 

executive director. The board eventually replaced Beers with an interim CEO and 

a management team. 

{¶ 7} When Hawthorn began to reassert control over the Mission, 

members of the board of trustees determined that the best interests of the 

organization required his removal as president. While divided on this issue, the 

board in November 2000 extended Hawthorn’s leave of absence indefinitely, and 

Russell and Lupton, at least, believed that this leave relieved him of all executive 

authority. 

{¶ 8} Russell scheduled a meeting of the board of trustees for December 

4, 2000, to discuss the attorney general’s investigation, to remove Hawthorn and 

his brother-in-law, Ron Beers, from the board, and to force Hawthorn to retire. 

{¶ 9} Hawthorn then retained Wheeler and the law firm of Roderick 

Linton to ensure that he retained control of the board. He scheduled a board 

meeting on December 4, earlier in the day than the one scheduled by the board. 

Wheeler prepared a special meeting agenda for the earlier meeting that included 

removing Russell from the board and retaining Roderick Linton as counsel for the 

Mission. Because neither faction could assemble a quorum, neither succeeded in 

removing the other from the board. 
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{¶ 10} On December 6, 2000, Hawthorn changed the locks on the 

Mission’s building, fired the board-appointed management team, and announced 

to employees that he had control of the organization. When Russell, who had 

been informed of Hawthorn’s actions, arrived at the building, Hawthorn purported 

to remove him from the board, and Wheeler ordered Russell to leave the 

premises. 

{¶ 11} Hawthorn then scheduled a teleconference meeting of the board for 

December 11, 2000. Although Russell and Lupton were both given notice of the 

meeting and planned at that time to seek removal of Hawthorn and Ron Beers 

from the board, neither was permitted to participate. 

{¶ 12} At the meeting, Hawthorn and the board members present claimed 

that Dan Beers had not resigned from the board but rather had returned from a 

leave of absence as a trustee, found that a quorum existed, and thus purported to 

remove Russell and Lupton from the board and elect a new slate of trustees more 

favorable to Hawthorn. Hawthorn also informed the board that he had retained 

Wheeler on behalf of the Mission. 

{¶ 13} That same day, the attorney general, Russell, and Lupton brought 

an action in the name of the Mission against Hawthorn and others to recover 

funds misappropriated from the organization. Wheeler filed a notice to 

voluntarily dismiss the action on behalf of the Mission. Importantly, the attorney 

general, Russell, and Lupton moved to strike the notice and asserted that Wheeler 

and another Roderick Linton attorney represented only Hawthorn and the other 

defendants, but were “not attorneys for Plaintiff Barberton Rescue Mission, Inc., 

nor [was] there any way they conceivably could be.” (Emphasis sic.) 

{¶ 14} On December 22, 2000, the attorney general, Russell, and Lupton 

filed a separate action on behalf of the Mission in the Ninth District Court of 

Appeals seeking a writ of quo warranto to restore Russell and Lupton as members 
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of the Mission’s board of trustees. They alleged that Hawthorn had usurped 

control over the Mission and operated it without corporate authority to do so. 

{¶ 15} Wheeler subsequently ended her association with Roderick Linton 

in February 2001, and in April 2001, the common pleas court appointed R. Scott 

Haley as operating receiver for the Mission. Although neither Russell nor Lupton 

acknowledged Wheeler’s authority to represent the Mission, Haley formally 

terminated her as counsel for the Mission. She continued to represent Hawthorn 

in the court matter, however, until she withdrew in August 2001. The common 

pleas court litigation proceeded with new defense counsel and resulted in a 

$2,950,000 jury verdict against Hawthorn. 

{¶ 16} On October 3, 2001, the court of appeals entered a summary 

judgment in the quo warranto action in favor of the attorney general, finding that 

Dan Beers had not taken a leave of absence from the board of trustees but had 

resigned from that position. The court therefore determined that the December 

11, 2000 meeting, during which Hawthorn had attempted to oust Russell and 

Lupton from the board of trustees, was invalid for lack of a quorum, and it further 

held that “[b]ecause the meeting was invalid, any and all actions taken at that 

meeting [were] void.” State ex rel. Montgomery v. Hawthorn (Oct. 3, 2001), 

Summit App. No. 20391, 2001 WL 1169559. 

{¶ 17} New Destiny then filed this legal malpractice action against 

Wheeler and Roderick Linton, asserting that they had breached their obligations 

as attorneys and had negligently represented that a quorum had been present at the 

December 11, 2001 meeting, which allowed Russell and Lupton to be removed 

from the board and left Hawthorn in control of the Mission. 

{¶ 18} The trial court entered summary judgment in favor of Wheeler and 

Roderick Linton, concluding that no genuine issue of material fact existed 

regarding whether the attorneys had entered into an attorney-client relationship 

with the Mission. As the court explained, “[t]he facts of this case do not provide 
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for a legal malpractice cause of action because there was never an attorney-client 

relationship between Defendants and Plaintiffs. In fact, the opposite is true: the 

current parties had an adversarial relationship * * *. The factions had separate 

interests, separate Boards, and separate attorneys.” 

{¶ 19} The court of appeals reversed the trial court on the issue of the 

existence of an attorney-client relationship, explaining that because a corporation 

is an entity separate from its constituents, testimony from Russell and Lupton that 

Wheeler did not represent the Mission is not conclusive. The appellate court 

determined that the fact that Hawthorn hired Wheeler in his capacity as president 

of the Mission established a genuine issue of material fact regarding the existence 

of an attorney-client relationship. The appellate court rejected the argument that 

New Destiny should be judicially estopped from asserting the existence of an 

attorney-client relationship, holding that Wheeler and Roderick Linton had 

unclean hands, having “represented themselves as attorneys for the Mission,” and 

thus could not assert the defense of judicial estoppel. New Destiny Treatment 

Ctrs., Inc. v. Wheeler, 9th Dist. No. 24404, 2009-Ohio-6956, at ¶ 29. 

Arguments on Appeal

{¶ 20} Wheeler and Roderick Linton assert that they were not the 

attorneys for the Mission but rather that they represented one faction seeking to 

control the Mission’s board. They note that the lawfully constituted board of 

trustees never considered Wheeler to be the attorney for the board or for the 

Mission and that Hawthorn’s leave of absence deprived him of both actual and 

apparent authority to engage an attorney on the Mission’s behalf. Wheeler and 

Roderick Linton also contend that the Mission should be judicially estopped from 

asserting that an attorney-client relationship existed because it had successfully 

argued a contrary position in prior litigation. 
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{¶ 21} Finally, they argue that a court of appeals may not reverse a trial 

court’s judgment if alternative grounds for affirming it are preserved in the record 

and raised on appeal. 

{¶ 22} New Destiny, on the other hand, maintains that Wheeler and 

Roderick Linton acted as the corporate counsel for six months, that Hawthorn 

controlled the corporation and held out Wheeler and Roderick Linton as 

representing the Mission during that time, and that its employees treated them as 

counsel. Also, New Destiny relies on the doctrine of equitable estoppel to bar 

Wheeler and Roderick Linton from denying that they had an attorney-client 

relationship with the corporation, asserting that the attorneys represented that they 

were attorneys for the Mission and that the Mission relied to its detriment on 

those representations by paying their attorney fees. 

{¶ 23} Accordingly, the question presented is whether an attorney 

retained by a dissident member of a nonprofit corporation’s board of trustees in an 

effort to gain control of the corporation may subsequently be sued for malpractice 

by the corporation. 

Standard of Review 

{¶ 24} Our review of cases decided on summary judgment is de novo, 

governed by the standard set forth in Civ.R. 56. Comer v. Risko, 106 Ohio St.3d 

185, 2005-Ohio-4559, 833 N.E.2d 712, ¶ 8. A trial court should enter summary 

judgment in favor of the moving party if “ ‘(1) there is no genuine issue of 

material fact; (2) the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law; and 

(3) it appears from the evidence that reasonable minds can come to but one 

conclusion when viewing evidence in favor of the nonmoving party, and that 

conclusion is adverse to the nonmoving party.’ ” Doe v. Shaffer (2000), 90 Ohio 

St.3d 388, 390, 738 N.E.2d 1243, quoting Grafton v. Ohio Edison Co. (1996), 77 

Ohio St.3d 102, 105, 671 N.E.2d 241. 

The Attorney-Client Relationship 
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{¶ 25} To establish a cause of action for legal malpractice, a claimant 

must demonstrate the existence of an attorney-client relationship giving rise to a 

duty, a breach of that duty, and damages proximately caused by that breach. 

Krahn v. Kinney (1989), 43 Ohio St.3d 103, 105, 538 N.E.2d 1058. Accordingly, 

as we explained in Shoemaker v. Gindlesberger, 118 Ohio St.3d 226, 2008-Ohio2012, 887 N.E.2d 1167, “[i]f a plaintiff fails to establish a genuine issue of 

material fact as to any of the elements, [the attorney] is entitled to summary 

judgment.” Id. at ¶ 8. 

{¶ 26} To determine whether an attorney-client relationship exists, the 

law looks to the manifest intentions of the attorney and the prospective client. 1 

Hazard & Hodes, The Law of Lawyering (2005) 2-8, Section 2.5. A relationship 

of attorney and client arises when a person manifests an intention to obtain legal 

services from an attorney and the attorney either consents or fails to negate 

consent when the person has reasonably assumed that the relationship has been 

established. Id.; 1 Restatement of the Law 3d, The Law Governing Lawyers 

(2000) 126-128, Section 14. Thus, the existence of an attorney-client relationship 

does not depend on an express contract but may be implied based on the conduct 

of the parties and the reasonable expectations of the putative client. Hazard & 

Hodes, supra, at 2-9; Becker, Guttenburg & Snyder, The Law of Professional 

Conduct in Ohio (2009-2010) 1-15 to 1-16, Section 1.07[1]; Flamm, Lawyer 

Disqualification: Conflicts of Interest and Other Bases (2003) 221-222, Section 

11.2; see also Cuyahoga Cty. Bar Assn. v. Hardiman, 100 Ohio St.3d 260, 2003-

Ohio-5596, 798 N.E.2d 369, ¶ 10 (“The determination of whether an attorneyclient relationship was created turns largely on the reasonable belief of the 

prospective client”). 

{¶ 27} However, in this case, the putative client is a corporate entity, and 

an attorney employed or retained by a corporation represents the organization 

acting through its constituents; the attorney does not owe allegiance to a 
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stockholder, director, officer, or other person connected with the corporation. 

Prof.Cond.R. 1.13(a); former EC 5-19. Thus, because a corporate attorney 

represents the organization acting through its agents, id., in order to form an 

attorney-client relationship with a corporation, the party hiring counsel on behalf 

of the corporation must necessarily have authority to do so and must reasonably 

believe that an attorney-client relationship has been established. 

{¶ 28} Here, no one with authority to employ counsel for the Mission 

retained either Wheeler or the firm of Roderick Linton, and no corporate 

resolution exists to that effect. While Hawthorn purported to retain them in his 

capacity as president of the Mission in December 2000, the board of trustees had 

placed him on a leave of absence in May 2000 and had extended that leave of 

absence indefinitely in November 2000. Both Russell and Lupton testified that 

Hawthorn had been relieved of his authority to control the daily activities of the 

corporation during this period of time. Thus, Hawthorn lacked authority in his 

capacity as president to retain counsel on behalf of the Mission in December 

2000. 

{¶ 29} Further, New Destiny does not point to anything in this record 

showing that any other constituent of the Mission with authority to obtain counsel 

retained Wheeler, nor does it indicate that any board meeting took place at which 

the duly elected directors established a quorum and ratified Wheeler’s 

employment or that of the law firm of Roderick Linton as the Mission’s counsel. 

In fact, both Russell and Lupton testified that Wheeler did not represent the 

Mission as its attorney, because they considered her to be the attorney for 

Hawthorn and his faction. 

{¶ 30} Moreover, the complaint filed by New Destiny in this case states 

that Wheeler and Roderick Linton never had authority to represent the Mission, 

alleging that Wheeler and the law firm provided advice to the Hawthorn faction of 

the board that “purported to result in her retention as counsel” (emphasis added) 
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for the Mission but that their employment was actually “void and invalid.” New 

Destiny cites no legal principle that would allow it to deny the existence of an 

attorney-client relationship between the Mission and Wheeler or the law firm in 

its complaint while simultaneously seeking to recover a judgment against them 

for legal malpractice. 

{¶ 31} Accordingly, New Destiny has not met its burden to establish the 

existence of an attorney-client relationship between the Mission and Wheeler or 

Roderick Linton, and no evidence of such a relationship exists. Thus, summary 

judgment is appropriate in connection with New Destiny’s legal malpractice 

claims, and the question whether an appellate court may reverse a trial court’s 

judgment if alternative grounds for affirming it are preserved in the record and 

raised on appeal therefore becomes moot.

Conclusion

{¶ 32} A claimant may not maintain a cause of action for malpractice 

against an attorney in the absence of an attorney-client relationship. Because 

neither Wheeler nor Roderick Linton ever represented the Mission, but rather 

represented only a dissident faction of the corporation, the trial court properly 

entered summary judgment on the legal malpractice claim asserted against them. 

Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and reinstate the 

summary judgment entered by the trial court in favor of Wheeler and Roderick 

Linton. 

Judgment reversed. 

 PFEIFER, ACTING C.J., and ROGERS, LUNDBERG STRATTON, CUPP, and 

MCGEE BROWN, JJ., concur. 

 LANZINGER, J., concurs in judgment only. 

 RICHARD M. ROGERS, J., of the Third Appellate District, sitting for 

O’CONNOR, C.J. 

__________________ 
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 Gibson & Lowry, Michael J. Moran, and Kenneth L. Gibson, for appellee 

New Destiny Treatment Center, Inc. 

 Gallagher Sharp, Alan M. Petrov, Timothy J. Fitzgerald, Jay Clinton Rice, 

and Theresa A. Richthammer, for appellant Roderick Linton, L.L.P. 

 Reminger Co., L.P.A., Brian D. Sullivan, Martin T. Galvin, and John P. 

O’Neil, for appellant E. Marie Wheeler. 

______________________