Janik

Plaintiff seeks to impose liability on attorneys who produced a class action recovery of some $90 million, claiming they were negligent because they failed to obtain a still larger recovery. While we may share the attorneys’ dismay that their efforts have been rewarded with this lawsuit rather than with the kudos they no doubt expected, and perhaps deserve, we are nonetheless constrained to hold that plaintiff’s claim cannot be rejected out of hand. While it may well be that the attorneys did not breach their duty of care in failing to proceed under an alternative theory that would have produced a greater recovery, we cannot say, as did the trial court, that there simply was no duty for the attorneys to breach.

Plaintiff Stanley Janik brought this purported class action for legal malpractice against defendants Steven Zieff and the law firm of Rudy, Exelrod & Zieff, LLP (collectively defendants or the attorneys), alleging that the attorneys mishandled a prior class action against Farmers Insurance Exchange (Farmers). While having secured recovery for a large class of claims representatives who were not paid overtime compensation on the ground that they were administrators…