Gallardo Levin Reiter & Rogers Partners Ralph Catalano and Matt Flanagan successfully defended a medical malpractice lawyer before the Court of Appeals. The attorney was sued under Judiciary Law § 487 – New York’s attorney-deceit statute – based on the manner in which his legal fee was calculated and approved by the medical malpractice court. The fee calculation applied the sliding-scale fee-schedule required by Judiciary Law § 474-a to the separate claims in the medical malpractice action. While the Court declined to pass on the construction of the fee statute, it affirmed summary judgment, stating that the “calculations were supported by a legal argument that was not clearly foreclosed by existing precedent, and [the attorney] was transparent with the tribunal about how he arrived at those calculations.”
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