Court Opinion

ID: 9600512
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:27:55.382755+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:52.908262
License: Public Domain

Fletcher, Chief Justice.
The issue in this legal malpractice case is what duty attorney David Turner, Jr. owed his client, William Barnes, Jr., with respect to maintaining Barnes’s security interest that lapsed. The Court of Appeals held that Turner’s only duty was to inform Barnes that his security interest required renewal in five years.1 Because under that view the statute of limitations expired before Barnes filed his malpractice action, the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s decision to grant Turner’s motion to dismiss. We conclude, however, that if Turner failed to inform Barnes of the renewal requirement, Turner undertook a duty to renew the security interest himself. The statute of limitations has not expired for an alleged breach of that duty, and therefore we reverse.
On October 1, 1996, Barnes sold his company, William Barnes’ Quality Auto Parts, Inc., to James and Rhonda Lipp for $220,000. The Lipps paid $40,000 at the closing and executed a ten-year promissory note in favor of Barnes for the $180,000 balance. The note was secured by a blanket lien on the Lipps’s assets. On October 30,1996, Turner perfected Barnes’s security interest by filing UCC financing statements. Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to Barnes (as the non-moving party),2
3Turner did not, however, inform Barnes that under OCGA § 11-9-515, financing statements are only effective for five years, although their renewal for another five years is expressly provided for in that statute. The renewal is effected by filing continuation statements no earlier than six months before the end of the initial period.8 No renewal statements were filed, and on October 30, 2001, the original statements lapsed.
Unknown to Barnes, the Lipps had pledged the same collateral to F&M Bank and Trust Company and to Mid-State Automotive Distributors on December 28, 1998 and January 29, 2001, respectively. Both of these companies filed UCC financing statements, *789which put them in a senior position to Barnes when his financing statements lapsed. Barnes is still owed more than $142,792.09 under the promissory note, and James Lipp is now in Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Barnes sued Turner for malpractice on October 18, 2002. The trial court granted Turner’s motion to dismiss. Finding that the only possible incident of malpractice was Turner’s failure to inform Barnes of the renewal requirement in October 1996, the Court of Appeals held that the four-year statute of limitations had run and affirmed the trial court.4 We granted Barnes’s petition for certiorari.
1. Barnes contends that the Court of Appeals erred in simply looking to Turner’s actions in October 1996 as constituting the malpractice. If Turner hadrenewed the financing statements in 2001, Barnes argues, there would have been no lapse in his security interest and thus no malpractice. Barnes contends that Turner’s duty was to safeguard his security interest, which Turner could have satisfied by either informing Barnes of the renewal requirement or renewing the financing statements in 2001. Under this view, Turner breached his duty in 2001, when he failed to do both, and thus the statute of limitations on Barnes’s action has not expired. For the following reasons, we agree.
A motion to dismiss should only be granted if “the allegations of the complaint, when construed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff with all doubts resolved in the plaintiffs favor, disclose with certainty that the plaintiff would not be entitled to relief under any state of provable facts.”5 Accordingly, the grant of Turner’s motion to dismiss was only proper if Barnes’s duty ended in 1996.6
Turner contends that he was not retained to file renewal statements. While Georgia’s appellate courts have not previously addressed this issue, decisions from other states make clear that an attorney in Turner’s position must at least file original UCC financing statements, even absent specific direction from the client.7 We agree. An attorney has the duty to act with ordinary care, skill, and diligence *790in representing his client.8 In sale of business transactions where the purchase price is to be paid over time and collateralized, it is paramount that the seller’s attorney prepare and file UCC financing statements to perfect his client’s security interest. We further hold, for the reasons given below, that if the financing statements require renewal before full payment is made to the seller, then the attorney has some duty regarding this renewal. Otherwise the unpaid portion of the purchase price becomes unsecured and the seller did not receive the protection he bargained for.
Safeguarding a security interest is not some unexpected duty imposed upon the unwitting lawyer; it goes to the very heart of why Turner was retained: to sell Barnes’s business in exchange for payment. We do not, as the dissent contends, demand that the lawyer “ascertain the full extent of the client’s ‘objectives’ ”; only that the lawyer take reasonable, legal steps to fulfill the client’s main, known objective — to be paid for the business he sold.
The dissent views only the sale of the business as important since this is what happens at the closing; but why does a client sell his business if not to receive payment? When the dissent argues that Turner’s duty was simply to “close” the transaction, it fails to recognize that closing this particular transaction meant taking the reasonable steps that competent attorneys would take to legally secure their clients’ right to receive payment for the businesses they have sold. Where payment is to be made in less than five years, Georgia law does not require renewal of the initial financing statements and thus the lawyer’s duty is only to file the initial statements. But where payment is to take longer than five years, the lawyer — being trusted by his client to know how to safeguard his security interest under Georgia law — has some duty regarding renewal of the financing statements. The question is the nature of that duty.
Under the dissent’s view, a client has to specifically ask his lawyer to renew the financing statements for this to be among the lawyer’s duties. But how can the client be expected to know of this legal requirement? He hires the lawyer because the lawyer knows the law. The client cannot be expected to explicitly ask the lawyer to engage in every task necessary to fulfill the client’s objectives.
The Court of Appeals held that a failure to inform by Turner was the sole possible grounds for malpractice.9 But this is too narrow a definition of Turner’s duty. The duty was not necessarily to inform Barnes of the renewal requirement; often transactional attorneys do *791no such thing and simply renew the financing statements themselves. These attorneys have not breached a duty. Turner’s duty was to safeguard Barnes’s security interest. There were two means of doing so: by informing Barnes of the renewal requirement, or by renewing the financing statements himself in 2001. Either one would have been sufficient to comply with Turner’s duty, and any breach of that duty occurred only upon Turner’s failure to do both.
Further, if Turner’s only duty arose in 1996, then Barnes had to bring suit before the financing statements could even be renewed to comply with the four-year statute of limitations. Barnes contends that any such action would have been dismissed as unripe because he was still a secured party at the time. He is correct. The dissent’s view deprives Barnes and any clients in his position of any remedy for malpractice. The dissent’s view precludes Barnes from ever maintaining a malpractice suit against Turner, who failed to take a simple, necessary action that will likely leave Barnes without his business and without over 78% of the purchase price he is still owed for that business.
The dissent’s hyberbole about the effect of this opinion mischaracterizes our holding, which is based on a unique set of facts: a collateralized, payment-over-time arrangement in exchange for a sale of business where the payment period exceeds the five-year life span afforded to initial financing statements under OCGA § 11-9-515. The lawyer, being retained to protect his client’s interests in connection with the sale of his business, is the only party who knows the legal requirements for maintaining the effectiveness of the security interest. He can either share this knowledge with his client — a very simple step — or renew the financing statements before they expire — an equally simple step. The dissent’s concern over the expansion of attorney duties is unwarranted.
2. The dissent also argues that imposing a duty to renew on Turner is an adoption of the “continuous representation rule,” which Georgia courts have rejected except in personal injury cases.10 Under *792this rule, a continuing relationship or continuing wrong can toll the statute of limitations.11 In the case cited by the dissent, Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C. v. Frame,12 the alleged malpractice was only that material financial information was omitted from the closing documents; there was not, as in the present case, some further action beyond the closing at issue, and thus Hunter, Maclean is inapposite to our situation. The continuous representation rule is not implicated in this case. We are not holding that a failure to inform by Turner in 1996 was a continuing wrong that tolled the statute of limitations until 2001. To the contrary, we are holding that a failure to inform in 1996 means that Turner undertook a duty to renew in 2001, and the statute of limitations began running from the date of alleged breach of that duty.13
In light of the foregoing considerations, we reverse the Court of Appeals’s decision that affirmed the trial court’s grant of Turner’s motion to dismiss. Barnes’s malpractice action was filed within four years of the failure to renew the financing statements in 2001, and thus may proceed.

Judgment reversed.

All the Justices concur, except Benham, Thompson and Hines, JJ., who dissent.

 Barnes v. Turner, 265 Ga. App. 6 (593 SE2d 9) (2003).

 Cooper v. Unified Govt. of Athens-Clarke County, 275 Ga. 433, 434 (2) (569 SE2d 855) (2002).

 OCGA§ 11-9-515 (c).

 OCGA § 9-3-25; Tucker v. Smith, 249 Ga. App. 305, 308 (1) (547 SE2d 604) (2001).

 Cooper, 275 Ga. at 434.

 The dissent’s reliance on Pfeiffer v. Ga. Dept. of Transp., 275 Ga. 827 (573 SE2d 389) (2002) is inapposite. In Pfeiffer, we held that a party could not seek to reverse a grant of summary judgment by raising a new argument for the first time on appeal. However, this case involved the grant of a motion to dismiss. In reviewing the grant of a motion to dismiss, it is the duty of the appellate court to “construe the pleadings in the light most favorable to [the appellant] with all doubts resolved in [appellant’s] favor ’’ Alford v. Public Svc. Comm., 262 Ga. 386, n. 2 (418 SE2d 13) (1992). By considering all the allegations of the complaint, including the failure to renew, this Court is simply applying the correct standard of review.

 See Practical Offset, Inc. v. Davis, 404 NE2d 516, 520 (Ill. App. 1980). The failure to file a UCC financing statement has even been held to constitute legal malpractice as a matter of law. See Lory v. Parsoff, 296 AD2d 535 (N.Y. App. Div. 2002); Deb-Jo Constr. v. Westphal, 210 AD2d 951 (N.Y. App. Div. 1994).

 Tante v. Herring, 264 Ga. 694, 694 (453 SE2d 686) (1994); Restatement (Third) of the Law Governing Lawyers § 16 (2) (1998).

 The dissent argues that the failure to inform is not within the scope of our question posed on certiorari and thus does not consider it. But this is incorrect. Our certiorari question asked:
*791Whether the statute of limitation began to run on petitioner’s malpractice claim in October 1996 when Turner assumed the on-going duty to renew the UCC forms or when Turner breached that on-going duty in October 2001 or must the breach necessarily relate back to the date on which the on-going duty was assumed?
The only possible way for Turner to have assumed a duty to renew was by failing to inform Barnes of the renewal requirement; therefore, the question assumes that he so failed to inform Barnes. Both parties argued the failure to inform in their briefs and at oral argument. Turner’s actions in 1996 are integral to understanding the duty he undertook in 2001, and were clearly contemplated by our certiorari question.

 See, e.g., Corp. of Mercer Univ. v. Nat. Gypsum Co., 258 Ga. 365, 366 (2) (368 SE2d 732) (1988); Jankowski v. Taylor, Bishop & Lee, 246 Ga. 804, 806-807 (2) (273 SE2d 16) (1980); Stocks v. Glover, 220 Ga. App. 557, 558-559 (1) (469 SE2d 677) (1996).

 Everhart v. Rich’s, Inc., 229 Ga. 798 (194 SE2d 425) (1972).

 269 Ga. 844, 849 (507 SE2d 411) (1998).

 The sole issue before us is the scope of the duty allegedly breached. Therefore, we do not address the other elements of Barnes’s malpractice claim: breach of duty, causation, and damages. See, e.g., Tante, 264 Ga. at 694.