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Real estate claims top American Bar Association malpractice list

By: DOLAN MEDIA NEWSWIRES//September 10, 2012//

Real estate claims top American Bar Association malpractice list

By: DOLAN MEDIA NEWSWIRES//September 10, 2012//

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By Matt Yas
Dolan Media Newswires

For the first time since the American Bar Association began conducting surveys of legal malpractice insurance claims in 1985, insurers have reported a higher percentage of claims involving real estate than any other area of law.

Personal injury-plaintiff and family law round out the top three areas in the “Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims: 2008-2011,” released Friday by the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers’ Professional Liability. In all five previous versions of the survey, personal injury-plaintiff matters had been No. 1 in generating lawyer malpractice claims.

Eleven member insurers of the National Association of Bar-Related Insurance Companies from the U.S. and nine from Canada contributed data to the study, along with eight commercial insurance companies. Insurers provided data on 53,000 claims for the 2011 study, the most ever.

The study presents data on number of claims by area of law, number of lawyers in the firm, type of activity, disposition of claim, type of alleged error, indemnity dollars paid to claimant and other categories.

The study found that the type of activity most likely to generate claims was “preparation, filing, and transmittal of documents,” retaining its No. 1 position from previous years. “Advice” moved up to become the second-most-likely reported activity to generate claims.

Of the individual errors generating claims in this edition of the study, “failure to file a document/no deadline” showed a steep decline in its share of all errors, dropping from its second-place position in the 2007 study to the bottom third percentage of all individual errors.

The study’s authors cautioned that because the survey relies on self-reporting only from those participating legal malpractice insurers, it is not a comprehensive review of all malpractice claims against all lawyers and should not be used by underwriters to determine high- and low-risk practices.

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