A Manhattan judge has ruled that two Westchester law firms did not commit legal malpractice while representing a Scarsdale woman who paid attorneys nearly $2 million in a contentious divorce case.
Judge James E. d”™Auguste of Supreme Court, New York County, dismissed a lawsuit filed against Boies Schiller Flexner LLP of Armonk, and the former Bender and Kaplan PC of White Plains.
Beth Coplan Kaufman hired the Boies firm and a firm that later became known as Bender and Kaplan, in 2012, to represent her in a divorce case against Thomas Z. Kaufman.
The Kaufmans were married in 1992, bought a 6,000-square-foot house in Scarsdale in 1997 and “lived off of the income stream from the marital investments,” according to a related lawsuit Mrs. Kaufman filed against Mr. Kaufman in 2017.
Mrs. Kaufman co-owned B. Coplan Collections Ltd., a jewelry business, and Mr. Kaufman owned Tom Kaufman Productions, a Manhattan events company.
Mrs. Kaufman bought art as investments, Mr. Kaufman concentrated on stocks and bonds, and they invested in real estate ventures.
In 2015, the Kaufmans agreed to a settlement that allotted $2 million to Mrs. Kaufman, plus $4.75 million subject to the final sale price of their Scarsdale house.
Mrs. Kaufman has since taken issue with the financial calculations and in 2018 sued her lawyers for allegedly mishandling her case.
She accused the law firms of breach of contract for allegedly overbilling her and violations of the judiciary law for alleged procedural errors.
For instance, she claimed that the Boies firm charged her $638,663 for services and expenses of a partner in Florida who was not licensed to practice in New York. She accused her attorneys of canceling a mediation so they could continue billing her.
The law firms argued, in part, that the lawsuit should be dismissed because it was filed too late under the three-year statute of limitations.
Judge d”™Auguste ruled that he need not rule on the timeliness of the complaint because Mrs. Kaufman”™s pleadings on both charges were inadequate.
The breach of contract charge must be dismissed, he ruled, because the retainer agreements did not commit the firms to obtaining a specific result, and Mrs. Kaufman did not allege that the lawyers broke a promise to achieve a specific result.
Her claim of fraudulent billing had to show that the fees bore no rational relationship to the product delivered, d”™Auguste ruled, and not just complaints about the quality of the work.
Her claim that the firms violated judiciary law failed to show that the lawyers intended to deceive her when they canceled the mediation, he said.
“The documentary evidence seemingly refutes any inference that defendants canceled the mediation,” the judge noted, “for the sole purpose of willfully delaying the divorce proceeding for their own gain.”
Mrs. Kaufman did not formally accuse the lawyers of legal malpractice, despite including the word “malpractice” twice in the lawsuit. Nonetheless, d”™Auguste said, he could consider the question.
“Here, the documentary evidence refutes the cause of action for legal malpractice,” he ruled. Mrs. Kaufman”™s claim that the lawyers knew she did not understand an oral settlement agreement “are clearly contradicted by her sworn testimony before the court in the divorce proceeding.
