Environmental Network Corp. v. Goodman Weiss Miller, L.L.P

In Environmental Network Corp. v. Goodman Weiss Miller, L.L.P., 119 Ohio St.3d 209, 2008 Ohio 3833, 893 N.E.2d 173, the defendant attorneys had represented the plaintiff in litigation involving claims and counterclaims. The plaintiffs claimed damages of $ 5.4 million in the underlying litigation, while they faced liability on counterclaims and creditors' bills in the amount of $ 3.75 million. The case proceeded to trial. On the second day of trial, the parties settled. The result of the settlement was that the plaintiffs received no damages, but they paid nothing out of pocket, and received erasure of some debt obligations. Later, they sued their attorneys, claiming that the defendants coerced them into the settlement by refusing to continue representing them at the trial if they did not settle. The plaintiffs claimed that they would have received a better result if the underlying case had been tried to its conclusion rather than being settled during trial. The trial court and court of appeals determined that the plaintiffs had met their burden of establishing proximate causation by producing "some evidence" of the merits of their claims and defenses in the underlying action. The Supreme Court of Ohio reversed, reasoning that, because the plaintiffs' sole theory was that they would have achieved a better result had the trial continued, they were required to prove that they indeed would have achieved a better result through continuation of the trial to a verdict; the only way to prove that was to prove that their claims and defenses were meritorious enough to have actually procured the better result of which they claimed their attorneys deprived them. The court explained: Here, appellees' sole theory for recovery is that if the underlying matter had been tried to conclusion, they would have received a more favorable outcome than they obtained in the settlement. Therefore, unlike the plaintiffs in Vahila, who sustained losses regardless of whether their underlying case was meritorious, appellees here could recover only if they could prove that they would have succeeded in the underlying case and that the judgment would have been better than the terms of the settlement . Thus, the theory of this malpractice case places the merits of the underlying litigation directly at issue because it stands to reason that in order to prove causation and damages, appellees must establish that that appellant's actions resulted in settling the case for less than appellees would have received had the matter gone to trial. Id. at P18.