Court Opinion

ID: 9705333
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:02:43.910384+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:09.988020
License: Public Domain

*268CLIFFORD, J.,
dissenting in part.
I take to be settled, beyond the necessity for citation of authority, the proposition that to establish a prima facie case of legal malpractice a plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant lawyer failed to meet the standard of professional performance in the legal community, thereby causing loss or damage to the plaintiff. Equally well established is the requirement for expert testimony to demonstrate both the standard and the defendant’s deviation therefrom. In this case plaintiff submitted no expert report on defendant’s motion for summary judgment; therefore the trial court granted the motion — correctly, in my view.
That both parties had experts’ reports in their hip pockets and that the trial court may have been aware of those reports is of .no moment. Plaintiff did not even mark her expert’s report for identification, never mind in evidence. In fact, the report is before us only because plaintiff's attorney included it — wholly improperly, without leave of court — in the record submitted to the Appellate Division. To declare, as the Court does, ante at 264, 607 A. 2d at 1304, that “[t]he status of the reports is unclear” and that both parties “produced expert reports at the trial level” is to take with the record liberties that can be characterized generously only as “unwarranted.” In the pithy expression of Alfred E. Smith, commenting in 1936 on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, “baloney” is what it is (as in: “No matter how you slice it, it’s still baloney.” Gorton Carruth & Eugene Ehrlich, The Harper Book of American Quotations § 187.136 (1988). (That Gov. Smith’s position did not represent the majority view either has not escaped my attention.) And while I am still in this now-meandering parenthesis, I think the occasional resort to slang in our judicial opinions does not sully them, for slang, according to no less a literary figure than Carl Sandburg, is “a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations, Ideas for Our Time 284 (1987)). To suggest, as the Court does, ante at 264, 607 A.2d at 1305, that the trial court *269“did not examine the report closely” is to ascend to new heights of flummery. The trial court never even saw the report, much less “examined” it. And so plaintiffs submissions of proof were simply not sufficient to withstand defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
A final note. I agree entirely with the Court that a party’s expression of satisfaction with the terms of the settlement of a matrimonial action does not end the matter — that is, standing alone it does not constitute an absolute bar to a malpractice action against the lawyer. But I am unwilling to bend the sensible structure of our summary-judgment jurisprudence by substituting for our review a new record that goes beyond the “settlement” issue and then to decide the case on that record rather than on the one created at trial.
I dissent from so much of the Court’s judgment as affirms the Appellate Division’s reversal of summary judgment on Count Four.
Justice GARIBALDI joins in this opinion.
For affirmance in part, reversal in part and remandment — Chief Justice WILENTZ and Justices HANDLER, POLLOCK, O’HERN and STEIN — 5.
For reversal and remandment — Justices CLIFFORD and GARIBALDI — 2.