Viner

Certified for Partial Publication. [*]

In this lawsuit for legal malpractice arising from advice relating to a business transaction, the trial court refused to require proof of a "case within a case" as generally would be required in a malpractice action arising in the context of litigation. Instead the court applied criteria traditionally used in negligence actions to the questions of causation and damages. This meant the plaintiffs in this transactional legal malpractice action were not required to prove the opposing side in the contract negotiations would have given them a better deal than the contract terms affected by their attorney's negligence, had the negligence not occurred. We affirm the trial court's disposition of this issue in the published portion of this opinion. In an unpublished portion of the opinion we find the testimony of respondents' expert admissible and also conclude substantial evidence supports the verdict with the exception of two major categories of damages. Because the evidence was insufficient as to the latter, we reduce the judgment from $13,291,532 to $8,085,732.

In this appeal challenging the sufficiency of the evidence to support…