On December 6, 2023, the Second Department issued a decision in May Dock Lane, LLC v. Harras Bloom & Archer, LLP, 2023 NY Slip Op. 06244, holding that a legal malpractice claim should have been dismissed for failure to, among other things, adequately allege proximate cause, explaining:
To state a cause of action to recover damages for legal malpractice, a plaintiff must allege that the attorney failed to exercise the ordinary reasonable skill and knowledge commonly possessed by a member of the legal profession and that the attorney’s breach of this duty proximately caused plaintiff to sustain actual and ascertainable damages. To establish causation, the plaintiff must show that he or she would have prevailed in the underlying action or would not have incurred any damages, but for the attorney’s negligence. Conclusory allegations of damages or injuries predicated on speculation cannot suffice for a malpractice action, and dismissal is warranted where the allegations in the complaint are merely conclusory and speculative.
Here, even accepting the facts as alleged in the amended complaint to be true and according the plaintiff the benefit of every favorable inference, the amended complaint failed to state a cause of action for legal malpractice. To the extent the amended complaint alleged that due to the defendants’ deficient representation, the plaintiff could not make use of an easement on the adjacent property for two of the three subdivided lots, the plaintiff’s allegations were conclusory and speculative. Moreover, while the amended complaint alleged that a typo in an assignment of easement prepared by the defendants proximately caused the plaintiff to be subjected to a separate lawsuit regarding the easement, the defendants’ evidentiary submissions demonstrated that the typo was not a basis for the separate action.
Furthermore, the evidentiary submissions demonstrated that the plaintiff chose to submit a new proposal to subdivide its property into three lots following a suggestion made during a Planning Board meeting to consider changing the plan from a four-lot subdivision to a three-lot subdivision. Thus, the defendants demonstrated that material facts alleged in the amended complaint with respect to the allegation that the defendants proximately caused the plaintiff to only be able to subdivide the property into three lots were not facts at all, and that no significant dispute exists regarding them. Moreover, the amended complaint failed to set forth facts sufficient to allege that the defendants’ representation proximately caused the plaintiff to incur expenses associated with delays in the approval of the plaintiff’s application for subdivision.
(Internal quotations and citations omitted).