O’Quinn, firms prevail in legal-mal appeal

Sometimes when you lose, you win. And that’s what happened May 8 to a group of firms -- including one founded by plaintiffs lawyer John O’Quinn -- in a legal-malpractice case decided by Houston’s 1st Court of Appeals. In Grider v. O’Brien, et al., Rebbeca Dunn Grider sued O’Quinn and various firms over the way they handled her medical-malpractice suit, which Grider had lost at trial and on appeal. In her legal-mal suit, Grider alleged, among other things, that her lawyers in her med-mal suit advised her not to appeal the verdict and failed to calculate correctly the due date for her notice of appeal. A trial court dismissed Grider’s legal-malpractice suit on summary judgment and the 1st Court affirmed, because the firms that represented Grider were not the “proximate cause” of her loss in the med-mal case. Wrote Hanks, “Our review of the merits of Grider’s underlying medical malpractice case reveals that she would not have prevailed at the appellate level. Grider thus cannot prevail on her legal malpractice claim against the law firms because the law firms’ negligence did not proximately cause her damage.”

-- John Council