Court Opinion

ID: 9600515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:27:55.389581+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:52.910904
License: Public Domain

BENHAM, Justice,
dissenting.
For the purpose of ensuring recompense for a client who may have been caused a grievous financial loss by his attorney’s alleged failure to perform a simple duty, a majority of this court has ignored pertinent law and created a new species of duties which arise not from employment but from the occurrence of an initial mistake.
The central question in this legal malpractice case concerns the duty undertaken by Turner when he represented Barnes and his corporation in the sale of a business. The majority opinion begins with a statement of the issue which supposes the ultimate question by starting from the premise, as did the question posed in the grant of the writ of certiorari and set out in the majority opinion, that Turner owed a duty to maintain, as opposed to create, a security interest for Barnes. The holding of the majority opinion that Turner owed a duty to renew the security interest when it expired is thus based not on reasoning or the law, but on an unsupported assumption.
“It is axiomatic that the element of breach of duty in a legal malpractice case — the failure to exercise ordinary care, skill, and *793diligence — must relate directly to the duty of the attorney, that is, the duty to perform the task for which [the attorney] was employed.” Tante v. Herring, 264 Ga. 694 (1) (453 SE2d 686) (1994). Here, the task for which Turner was employed was to perform the services attendant to the closing of the sale of the business, including filing the UCC financing statements. He breached the duties arising from that employment, or did not, at that time. If he had a duty to inform Barnes of the need in the future to renew the statement, and did not do so, he breached the duty then and his potential liability came into existence.14 The record shows that Barnes asserts he continued to employ Turner for legal tasks, but not that Turner was engaged on an ongoing basis to protect Barnes’s interests in all legal matters which arose or might have arisen. To assert Turner had a duty arising from his representation during the closing which would not manifest itself for five years “would essentially be an adoption of the ‘continuing representation rule,’ which has been consistently rejected by Georgia courts in the malpractice context. . . .” Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C. v. Frame, 269 Ga. 844, 849 (507 SE2d 411) (1998).
The majority, however, imposes as a matter of law duties which were not undertaken by Turner and were not within the scope of his employment to close the sale of the business. The majority holds the asserted failure to inform Barnes of the future need to renew the UCC statements somehow created a duty on Turner’s part to renew the filings without having been retained to do so. The majority thus creates new duties that could outlast not only the period of the attorney-client relationship, but even the attorney’s life. In addition, by attaching to the asserted breach of one duty the conditional creation of a new and potentially more onerous duty, the majority destroys any notion of finality attorneys may hope to have in any aspect of their employment. No attorney can safely close a file and, apparently, no passage of time can insulate a mistake since the very happening of a mistake creates, under the majority’s view, another duty. Under the conditional duty concept created from the whole cloth by the majority, for which no authority or valid reasoning is offered, any change in employment status must trigger a full examination of every past transaction to be sure some inadvertence in the past has not created a new duty which would start a period of limitation running again.
*794Not only does this new duty, which can only be ascertained to have existed after damage from an original mistake has manifested, and perhaps (though the majority opinion is unclear on the point) after the expiration of the period of limitation has barred suit for the first mistake, add to every attorney’s potential liability to clients, it adds such uncertainty and lack of finality to every transaction that malpractice insurance carriers will be unable to make accurate assessments of their exposure. This will inevitably result in higher premiums, which will necessarily be passed on to clients. In addition to adding to the direct expense of legal representation, the increase in premiums and the need to institute greater safeguards to avoid liability will result in further consolidation of the practice of law in larger and larger firms because they will have greater resources to help prevent any oversight, and will require contracts of employment that stringently restrict the scope of representation by use of disclaimers intended to protect attorneys from any responsibility to clients other than the most narrow definition of the tasks for which attorneys are employed. The damage wrought by these restrictions will fall most heavily on the very class to which the plaintiff in this case belongs and which the majority purports to wish to protect, the proprietors of small businesses.
The majority’s resolution of the present case is not just shortsighted from a policy standpoint, but lacks a rational basis. It cites foreign authority for a proposition not contested by anyone, that Turner had a duty to file the financing statements, which he did, and then vaults without reasoning or authority to the creation of an additional duty to safeguard the security interest just created. It is at that point the majority invents, as noted above, a duty to “provide for payment to Barnes.” Thus, the simple act of performing the duty to create a security interest becomes a duty of indeterminate duration to ensure the payment of the obligation secured. To justify such a vast extension of the attorney’s duty, the majority suggests that the duty is not, as this Court held in Tante v. Herring, supra, “the duty to perform the task for which [the attorney] was employed,” but is rather, in some unspecified fashion, to ascertain the full extent of the client’s “objectives” in undertaking the transaction and then take whatever actions are necessary to see that the objectives are fulfilled. Apparently, the majority has created a new standard of care to be employed in reviewing an attorney’s success in ferreting out and guaranteeing accomplishment of all of a client’s objectives: what lawyers often do. That has never been the standard of care employed in legal malpractice cases and should not be applied here as the majority does.
That the majority’s approach here is dictated by a desired result rather than by law or reason is apparent from its frequent return to *795the lament that without the creation of this new duty to take all possible steps to guarantee payment of the obligation owed to the client, Barnes will not be able to recover his losses because the statute of limitation bars recovery for the breach of Turner’s duty to inform Barnes of the need to renew the financing statements in the future. That issue was resolved in the Court of Appeals and, as noted above, is not properly within the scope of the question posed by the Court in granting the writ of certiorari. Thus, the issue is not properly before us and, even if it were, would not warrant the creation of a new duty to avoid the unfortunate effect the correct application of statute-of-limitation law has had on Barnes.
Finally, it must be noted that the question of a duty to renew was properly omitted from the Court of Appeals’ consideration of this case and should never have been taken up by this Court for the simple reason that it was not litigated below. The majority seeks to avoid this problem with a reference to the pleadings, but ignores the fact that the trial court did not rule on that claim and the Court of Appeals, whose judgment we purport to review, did not rule on that issue. As this Court held in Pfeiffer v. Ga. Dept. of Transp., 275 Ga. 827, 829 (573 SE2d 389) (2002),
our appellate courts are courts for the correction of errors of law committed in the trial court. Routinely, this Court refuses to review issues not raised in the trial court. “ ‘To consider the case on a completely different basis from that presented below... would be contrary to the line of cases ... holding, “He must stand or fall upon the position taken in the trial court.” ’ ” Fairness to the trial court and to the parties demands that legal issues be asserted in the trial court.
(Footnotes omitted.) While Barnes raised in an initial pleading and in a written response to the motion to dismiss the assertion that Turner had a duty to renew the financing statements, that issue was not addressed in the actual defense of the motion and was not decided by the trial court. Notwithstanding the lack of any ruling on the issue below, a majority of this Court bases its judgment on it, becoming in effect a “super trial court” with authority to decide issues for the first time. That is not the proper role for this Court.
Notwithstanding the twists and turns employed by the majority to reach its desired result, this case is simple. Turner was employed to close a commercial transaction. Whatever duty he undertook was in connection with that employment and was breached or not at that time. There being no duty to renew the UCC statements in 2001, Turner’s failure to do so could not constitute a breach of duty which would support the legal malpractice claim against him. That being so, *796no basis exists for reversing the judgment of the Court of Appeals or of the trial court. I must, therefore, dissent to the majority’s result-oriented distortion of legal malpractice law to create a new duty of indeterminate duration which arises only upon the breach of an earlier duty.
Decided November 23, 2004
Reconsideration denied December 9, 2004.
Jones, Jensen & Harris, Taylor W. Jones, Richard E. Harris, for appellants.
Carlock, Copeland, Sender & Stair, Johannes S. Kingma, John C. Rogers, for appellee.
I am authorized to state that Justice Thompson and Justice Hines join in this dissent.

 The correctness of the decision of the Court of Appeals that the statute of limitation barred Barnes’s claim based on Turner’s failure to inform Barnes of the need to renew the filing is not within the scope of the question posed, which clearly dealt only with the duty to renew which the majority wrongly assumes, and should not be considered in this appeal. See Handson v. HCA Health Svcs. of Ga., 264 Ga. 293, n. 1 (443 SE2d 831) (1994).