Day on Torts
Where plaintiff’s workers’ compensation attorney received documents that provided notice of a potential HCLA claim, that notice was not imputed to plaintiff because the HCLA claim was not within the scope of the attorney’s representation of plaintiff.
In Marc v. Eck, No. E2023-01643-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Aug. 29, 2024), plaintiff was represented by an attorney in a workers’ compensation matter. In preparation for mediation in that matter, the attorney was given voluminous medical records on November 10, 2020. Included in these records were files related to a back surgery defendant performed on plaintiff on August 2, 2019.
Plaintiff’s workers’ compensation attorney began reviewing the records on November 30, 2020. During this review, she found notes from the surgery indicating that defendant had operated on the wrong section of plaintiff’s spine. The attorney informed plaintiff of this discovery sometime between November 30 and December 4, 2020, which was plaintiff’s first notice that the surgery had been performed incorrectly.
Plaintiff sent defendant pre-suit notice of her HCLA claim on November 24, 2021. She filed her complaint on March 30, 2022. Defendant filed a motion for summary judgment based on the statute of limitations, arguing that the attorney had documents in her possession that put her on notice of the HCLA claim on November 10, 2020, and that this notice was imputed to plaintiff. Because plaintiff did not send pre-suit notice within one year of that November 10th date, defendant asserted that the HCLA claim was time-barred. The trial court agreed and granted defendant summary judgment, but the Court of Appeals reversed.
The statute of limitations for a legal malpractice claim begins to run when the plaintiff “discovers, or in the exercise of reasonable diligence should have discovered, both (1) that he or she has been injured by wrongful or tortious conduct and (2) the identity of the person or persons whose wrongful conduct caused the injury.” (internal citation omitted). Here, the issue was whether plaintiff could be charged with constructive notice of the HCLA claim on the date her workers’ compensation attorney received a large set of medical records that included notes showing that plaintiff’s surgery was performed incorrectly.
The Court of Appeals first acknowledged that “[i]t is well settled that knowledge of facts learned by an attorney in the course of his or her employment will be imputed to his client.” (internal citation and quotation omitted). This rule, however, requires that the knowledge being imputed to the client be obtained “during the course and scope” of the attorney’s representation. (internal citation omitted). After looking at various cases applying and interpreting this rule, the Court wrote:
[I]mputation of knowledge from lawyer to client is not so simple as the proposition that anything a lawyer learns is imputed to her client. …[I]n order to impute a lawyer’s knowledge to her client, that knowledge must have been obtained by the lawyer during the course and scope of her representation.
When the attorney received the relevant information in this case, she was representing plaintiff in a workers’ compensation matter. Therefore, the Court had to analyze “whether the [HCLA] information was obtained in the scope of counsel’s representation.”
Ultimately, the Court ruled that the legal malpractice claim was not within the scope of the attorney’s initial representation of plaintiff. Because the knowledge should not have been imputed to plaintiff, plaintiff was not on notice of the claim until being informed by the attorney sometime on or after November 30, 2020. The Court explained:
On November 10, 2020, Plaintiff had no inkling of the information that would give rise to her health care liability action. Under principles of agency, knowledge obtained by an agent generally is imputed to the principal. Nevertheless, the scope of the agency is a relevant consideration. Not everything that a lawyer learns during the course of representing her client will fall under the scope of the representation that the lawyer was hired by the client to undertake. When such extraneous knowledge is acquired by a lawyer, it is not imputed to the client. The “course” of the lawyer’s representation is not always the same as the “scope” of the lawyer’s representation. If it were otherwise, this Court would not have stated that both were required to impute the knowledge to the client. The Trial Court correctly found that Plaintiff’s lawyer’s representation was limited only to Plaintiff’s workers’ compensation claim when the lawyer received the medical records. Here, there is no basis to charge Plaintiff with knowledge of a potential health care liability claim when she had retained counsel to represent her only in her workers’ compensation matter. The scope of Plaintiff’s counsel’s representation was to represent Plaintiff in her workers’ compensation matter. In sum, on November 10, 2020, Plaintiff’s counsel received the relevant information during the course, but not in the scope, of her representation. That will not suffice to impute Plaintiff’s workers’ compensation counsel’s knowledge to Plaintiff.
Because plaintiff was not on notice until at least November 30, 2020, and she sent her pre-suit notice within one year of that date, summary judgment was reversed.
The Court noted that there was no previous precedent for this exact factual scenario. Although the Court of Appeals reached the correct result in this matter and plaintiff was able to proceed with her HCLA claim, it would have been safer to file the HCLA claim within one year of the date the documents were sent to the worker’s compensation attorney.
The Court of Appeals released this opinion two months after oral arguments in this case.