CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- What do you do if your lawyer screws up your case?
More than 400 times last year more than once a day on average a lawyer in North Carolina got hit with a claim of legal malpractice, according to Lawyer s Mutual, the state s largest insurance company for lawyers.
The claims alleged that lawyers made mistakes serious enough to cost their clients thousands of dollars not to mention their day in court.
Cheryl Bailes e-mailed the I-Team after she felt like her family s lawyer botched their case. Cheryl s mother had filed a medical malpractice claim on behalf of her grandmother s estate. Cheryl s maternal grandmother died in 2004 after a doctor tried to refill a morphine pump inside her body.
To Cheryl, the case was about more than money. She had been close to her grandmother and lived with her for a year when Cheryl was in high school.
You know how grandmothers are sometimes closer to you than your mom? Cheryl said. She was just a cool lady.
Long after her grandmother s death, the circumstances disturbed Cheryl.
My grandmother suffered a lot and died a horrible, painful death, she said.
So the family hired a lawyer, Karen Zaman, and sued the doctor, his practice and the hospital.
But Zaman repeatedly missed court dates in Cheryl s family s case and with other clients. We did not know until sometime around the end of 2009 - just last year - that there had been reprimands.
The North Carolina State Bar had reprimanded Karen Zaman for neglecting clients, missing a critical filing deadline that forfeited her client s opportunity to make a claim and for taking a dismissal on a case and not even telling her client until more than a year later.
Consent Order Transferring Status to Disability Inactive Status
One judge ...found that Zaman s conduct amounted to gross neglect.
Cheryl and her mother were surprised.
Apparently she s done this to more people and families besides us, she said.
In March, Zaman settled Cheryl s family s case against the doctor for so little, the family says they never saw a penny.
Cheryl said she felt ...well, betrayed. You put your trust in your lawyer that's supposed to get justice for you. They're supposed to represent the law. They're supposed to represent the people. She didn't do that. She didn't represent us. She took advantage of us.
A week after settling the case, Karen Zaman surrendered her law license to the North Carolina State Bar and went on disability inactive status, presenting a statement from her doctor saying she had post-traumatic stress disorder. Zaman refused to speak on camera but told me by phone that she developed PTSD after a client tried to extort money from her.
When asked if she had spoken to anyone about a legal malpractice claim, Cheryl responded, I ve been trying to. It s very hard.
The reason it s hard, according to legal experts, is that Cheryl s family would have to win a case within a case.
First they d have to come up with the money to pay the medical experts to prove her grandmother was the victim of medical malpractice, which is neither cheap nor easy. Then the family would have to demonstrate in court that their lawyer was the reason they did not win the malpractice case to begin with.
They have to prove both aspects, said Charlotte School of Law professor Rebecca Wofford. It is a high standard of proof for a plaintiff in North Carolina in a legal malpractice case.
Lawyers can carry legal malpractice insurance through companies like Lawyers Mutual but there is no requirement that they do. The NC State Bar s website once listed whether licensed attorneys were insured but now it doesn t. The Bar lists disciplinary actions against lawyers.
North Carolina State Bar Disciplinary Actions
You need to know your attorney is insured - that they're capable of handling the case, that they've been successful in these types of cases and that there hasn't been a grievance filed against them in other cases, said Professor Wofford.
Lawyers Mutual s most recent annual report shows the number of claims against lawyers has gone from around 300 a year to more than 400 a year in the last five years.
Lawyers Mututal Annual Reports
But Cheryl s family probably will not be one of them. They say they just don t have the money.
We re kind of stuck with this, Cheryl said.
Just because the bar disciplines a lawyer does not mean that lawyer has committed malpractice.
Karen Zaman issued a notarized statement in response to the I-Team s questions which is posted below. She says she came to believe that Cheryl s family would not have won their case in court because their own expert witnesses changed their opinions and not because of anything she did or did not do.
Another family has filed a legal malpractice case against Zaman in Mecklenburg County.
Winning a judgment in that case and actually getting paid are another question entirely.
