Day on Torts
Plaintiff’s legal malpractice claim accrued when he received the order stating that some of his claims in a previous case were dismissed with prejudice.
In Abdou v. Clark, No. M2023-01461-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. July 3, 2024), plaintiff hired defendants to represent him in a lawsuit against several individuals. During the course of that litigation, plaintiff grew unhappy with defendants’ actions on his behalf. Plaintiff terminated defendants as his attorneys in July 2022, and he filed this pro se legal malpractice claim in February 2023. The trial court dismissed the legal malpractice action based on the statute of limitations, and the Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal.
In its opinion, the Court of Appeals reviewed multiple allegations on which plaintiff’s legal malpractice claim was based. First, it affirmed dismissal of plaintiff’s claim that defendants violated a Rule of Professional Conduct, noting that the Rules of Professional Conduct do not provide a basis for civil liability.
Next, the Court affirmed dismissal of plaintiff’s claim for racism. The Court pointed out that the allegations in the complaint talked about allegedly racist behavior by opposing counsel in the underlying lawsuit, not actions by defendants. Moreover, “Tennessee law does not recognize an independent cause of action for racism per se.”
Third, the Court affirmed dismissal of plaintiff’s allegations that defendants had violated certain criminal statutes. Because plaintiff could not enforce criminal statutes through this civil legal malpractice proceeding, dismissal was appropriate.
Fourth, the Court looked at specific behaviors cited by plaintiff as proof of legal malpractice. While plaintiff alleged that defendants pressed him to dismiss claims, failed to protect him, and performed negligently in other ways, all the actions cited by plaintiff occurred in 2021. Plaintiff did not file his complaint in this case until February 2023. Legal malpractice claims are subject to a one-year statute of limitations, so all claims related to these actions were time-barred.
Finally, plaintiff asserted that he was not aware of what the term “with prejudice” meant until his new attorney told him in 2022. He thus alleged that the approval and entry of an order dismissing some of his claims in the underlying suit with prejudice constituted legal malpractice. The Court, however, determined that pursuant to the discovery rule, this claim accrued no later than April 21, 2021, when the agreed order was entered. Plaintiff admitted that he was sent the order at that time. The Court wrote:
By his own averments, Mr. Abdou received actual notice of the agreed order on April 21, 2021, when Appellees sent it to him. Having received the document, Mr. Abdou was charged with reading it. If there were terms in the order that Mr. Abdou did not understand, it was incumbent on him to contact his attorneys to explain the terms or to otherwise research the question himself.
Accordingly, this claim was also time barred, and dismissal of the complaint as a whole was affirmed.
The Court of Appeals released this opinion two months after the case was assigned on briefs.