When Liability Appears Bleak, Pivot To Causation And Damages!

An old adage about legal strategy goes something like this: when your case is weak on the law, pound the facts. When your case is weak on the facts, pound the law. And when your case is weak on the facts and the law, pound the table.

We often are confronted with professional liability claims or cases where the defense on liability is weak and where the claimant can clearly articulate a set of damages and alleges negligence, i.e., the lawyer plainly missed the deadline and the underlying case was dismissed; the audited financial statements are clearly wrong, and someone lost a lot of money; or the insurance broker failed to procure the policy that they agreed to procure so the policyholder had to pay the claim out of their own pocket. When confronted with these types of claims or lawsuits, and when they include these devastating facts, we are inclined to throw up our hands and pay the claim or the settlement, often for the full value of the claimed loss. From a