Legal malpractice expert witness, washed away

Ghidoni, the plaintiff in a legal-malpractice case involving the handling of a lawsuit about the noise caused by water wells, offered Anderson as an expert witness. Anderson was a trial lawyer of thirty years’ experience, but had not handled matters involving the specific water-law problem at issue in the underlying case. The Fifth Court affirmed the decision to exclude Anderson:

“By way of analogy, ‘there is no validity . . . to the notion that every licensed medical doctor should be automatically qualified to testify as an expert on every medical question.’ Extending this principle to the topic of legal malpractice, ‘that a person may be a licensed attorney . . . who holds years of experience in the practice of law, standing alone, will not qualify him or her to give an opinion on every conceivable legal question, including legal malpractice issues.” While the record in this case shows that Anderson has handled several malpractice cases as an attorney and has testified as an expert witness in two such cases, it contains no evidence about the particular issues that Anderson handled or addressed in these capacities. Nor did Ghidoni offer evidence regarding the specific water law issues that Anderson has handled. Absent such proof, we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in excluding Anderson’s testimony.”

Ghidoni v. Skeins. No. 05-18-00355-CV (May 10, 2019) (mem. op.) (citations omitted).