PA Superior Court Rules, Expert Report that Merely Speculates About the Outcome of Underlying Action Is Insufficient to Establish Causation in Legal Malpractice Lawsuit.

The plaintiff alleged it would have mounted a successful defense to an underlying workers’ compensation action but for its attorney’s purported negligence in failing to conduct a thorough and timely investigation of the underlying claimant’s injury. 

One of the issues in the legal malpractice action was the sufficiency of the plaintiff’s expert report to establish the plaintiff’s allegation that it would have prevailed in the underlying workers’ compensation action. The trial court granted the defendant-attorney’s summary judgment, finding that the plaintiff’s expert report was mere speculation and conjecture, since it concluded only that a different outcome was “likely,” and failed to cite to any evidence of record to support that conclusion. 

On appeal, the Pennsylvania Superior Court, citing Meyers v. Robert Lewis Seigle, 751 A.2d 1182 (Pa. Super. 2000), reaffirmed that the legal malpractice causation standard requires the plaintiff to establish that it “would have” prevailed in the underlying action. The court opined that nowhere in his report did the expert identify the existence of any information or evidence that “would have” provided a viable defense for the plaintiff in the workers’ compensation action. The court stated that it is not enough to merely postulate there might have been some additional evidence the attorney might have found which might have been helpful to the plaintiff’s defense. The court stated that such speculation is wholly insufficient to create a material issue of fact to withstand summary judgment and, therefore, affirmed the trial court’s decision. 

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