Botched Property Sale Results In A Legal Malpractice Case
The Illinois Appellate Court recently rendered an interesting legal malpractice decision relating to the discovery rule in legal malpractice cases. In Tuchowski v. Rochford, the plaintiff contends that while she sold her home in the later part of 2000, she did not discover until 2003 that her former attorney had included in the sale a largely vacant adjacent lot that the plaintiff had hoped to sell separately at a later time. The trial court held that the plaintiff should have known at the time of the sale that she had sold the vacant lot because the closing documents she signed included references to that lot, and dismissed the complaint because it was filed outside the two-year statute of limitations period. In reversing the trial court's decision, the appellate court held that it could be inferred from the alleged facts that the plaintiff reasonably relied on her attorney when she signed the documents without reading them, and that because the court cannot say as a matter of law that the plaintiff should have known of the sale (or discovered the alleged malpractice) more than two years before she filed her complaint - the complaint was timely and the case was remanded for further proceedings.
Here are a few key facts that appear to have swayed the court:
1. The plaintiff owned three adjoining lots and her house stood on two of the lots while the third lot held only a shed and an outdoor grill. Originally the buyers of the home signed a contract to purchase (for $575,000) the house and the two lots on which the house stood. In a letter to the buyer's attorney, the defendant/plaintiff's former attorney offered to amend the contract to provide for the sale of all three lots at the same original contract price. Importantly, the letter does not indicate that the attorney sent a copy to her client the plaintiff.
2. At the time of the home sale, the plaintiff had been offered $125,000 for the vacant property by one of her neighbors.
3. In Illinois, the discovery rule takes into account the sophistication of the plaintiff in the particular area of knowledge - the plaintiff in this case was not in the real estate business and at the time of the closing was 77 years old.
4. Since the defendant was in a fiduciary relationship with the plaintiff the court was less stringent in holding the plaintiff responsible for knowing the contents of the documents she signed at the closing. Additionally, the defendant was not helped by the fact that at the closing she had directed the plaintiff to sign the documents as quickly as possible so that the defendant could go to a closing on another property.