Court Opinion

ID: 9694909
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:00:21.943945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:06.863450
License: Public Domain

Boyle, J.
(concurring). I agree with the result reached by the plurality because treating this issue as a question of law represents the best we can do. The circuit court will decide the question as a matter of law. If the Court of Appeals disagrees, it will reverse. This result is only possible if causation in appellate malpractice cases is treated as a question of law.
The aim of both civil and criminal litigation is to determine the truth and apply our laws to it. Because our courts are run by and for people, however, the goal is inherently unobtainable. In other words, the system is not perfect, but we do the best we can.
In a typical case where causation is an issue, the question might be whether a car’s allegedly defective steering mechanism caused an accident. The issue would be cause in fact — would the accident have happened if the steering had not been defective? The most accurate answer to this question could be obtained by reenacting the events leading up to the accident using a car that does not have defective steering. This type of reenactment, however, is usually neither possible npr, because of the expense and potential danger, desirable. For those reasons, the best we can do is give the evidence and expert advice* to a jury and let it decide.
This method does not represent the best we can do with cases alleging appellate legal malpractice. At issue is how the courts would have decided a *610legal question had it been properly raised or filed. Unlike cases alleging malpractice by doctors or engineers, in which the issue is what result would have been produced by a different procedure or structure, the issue in appellate malpractice cases is what the courts would have decided. If they would have decided the underlying case in favor of the plaintiff, then the plaintiff’s damages were caused by the defendant’s malpractice. Letting a jury decide how an appellate court would answer a legal question, however, is akin to letting a jury decide what a person in the courtroom is thinking. In both instances, a better way to find out would be to ask.
I am not saying that the law is nothing more than what judges say. It is unnecessary to pretend we have answered this ancient and very complex question that relates to how an appeal should be decided. The issue in this case is how an appeal would have been decided if the appeal had been timely filed. For the purpose of answering this question, we need only agree that the answer is what the judges would have decided, regardless of whether that might be right in a metaphysical sense. The best way to determine what they would have decided is to ask them by framing the question as one of law.

 We cannot simply assign the question to an expert because, if there is any disagreement among experts, it is necessary to decide which expert to use. We do, however, restrict which persons may testify as experts to those qualified "by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education . . . .” MRE 702.