Chicago Legal Malpractice Lawyer Blog
Gale v. Abramowitz is a fact pattern that comes up quite often – a lawyer makes an error and the error is eventually corrected. What damages did the client sustain? In this case the damages are the legal fees incurred to fix the error.
Pamela Gale hired the Abramowitz defendants to represent her in post-judgment divorce proceedings, where she was trying to collect her share of profit distributions under a postnuptial agreement. She claims her lawyers botched the job by failing to put into evidence the tax documents her own expert had relied on. Because those documents weren’t in the record, the referee awarded her less than the full amount she was owed. She then had to hire new lawyers, who—after more motion practice and a hearing—won her the full distribution she should have gotten in the first place.
Gale then sued her original lawyers for malpractice, seeking as damages the legal and expert fees she had to spend fixing their mistake. The trial court dismissed her complaint, but on June 2, 2026, the First Department unanimously reversed and reinstated the case.
The appellate court’s reasoning came down to three points. First, Gale adequately alleged negligence (failing to introduce the necessary tax documents) and “but for” causation (without the error, she wouldn’t have incurred at least some of the corrective fees). Under New York law—specifically the Court of Appeals’ Rudolf decision—a malpractice plaintiff can recover litigation expenses incurred trying to fix or minimize the damage caused by the lawyer’s mistake. Second, although Gale received some fee award in the underlying case, she alleged it only partially covered her actual costs; how much of her fees were actually reimbursed is a question for later in the litigation, not a basis for dismissal at the pleading stage. Third, the defendants’ estoppel arguments failed because the malpractice issues were never actually litigated in the divorce proceedings.
The practical takeaway: in New York (and any other state in the US) the cost of hiring successor counsel to repair a prior attorney’s error is itself a recoverable form of malpractice damages, and a plaintiff doesn’t need to prove the precise amount at the motion-to-dismiss stage—plausible allegations that the corrective fees exceeded any fee award are enough. This is a useful contrast to the proximate-causation hurdles plaintiffs often face: here, the “case within a case” was essentially self-proving, since new counsel actually obtained the better result.
2026 NY Slip Op 03388