Moores v. Greenberg

SELYA, C. J.

Ralph W. Moores, Jr., plaintiff, was injured while laboring as a longshoreman in Maine. After collecting compensation benefits from the stevedoring firm for which he worked-benefits actually paid by that firm's insurer, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company (LMIC)-he brought a third-party liability suit against the shipowners in Maine's federal district court. Nathan Greenberg was his attorney. They agreed that the lawyer's compensation would be contingent: the standard one-third of any judgment or settlement. But, the case was lost.

Moores wasted little time in turning upon his erstwhile champion. He sued for malpractice in a Massachusetts state court. Greenberg removed the case to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Following a jury trial, Moores was awarded $12,000. Although both parties assign error, we find no reason to forsake the verdict.

I. THE LAW OF THE CASE.

We pause briefly to reflect on the source of the applicable law. The district court, sitting in diversity jurisdiction, was duty bound to use state substantive law. Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins. . . . The litigants acknowledge that Maine law pertains. And, since no Maine court of record has spoken to certain of the issues before us, it becomes our duty to vaticinate how the state's highest tribunal would resolve matters. Nature Conservancy v. Machipongo Club, Inc. . . . “In undertaking this forecast, the court must look to relevant, i.e., analogous, state court decisions, and may assay sister state adjudications of the issue.” Plummer v. Abbott Laboratories. . . . In the process, we “may reasonably assume that [the state court] will follow the rule that appears best to effectuate” relevant policies. Bowen v. United States. . . .
II. THE LAWYER'S APPEAL.

Greenberg's appeal is a divaricated one. We travel each fork separately.

A. The Directed Verdict Motion. Greenberg contests the district court's denial of his motion for a directed verdict. He asserts that the evidence presented was insufficient as a matter of law to support liability. Given the operative facts of the case, however, this asseveration need not occupy us for long.

We recently have had occasion to summarize the principles which steer appellate oversight of rulings on directed verdict motions:

". . .[W]e may not consider the credibility of witnesses, resolve conflicts in testimony, or evaluate the weight of the evidence. Rather, we must examine the evidence and the inferences reasonably to be drawn therefrom in the light most favorable to the nonmovant. . . . A judgment . . . should be granted only when the evidence, viewed from this perspective, is such that reasonable persons could reach but one conclusion." Wagenmann v. Adams. . . . Greenberg has not come close to meeting this rigorous standard.

At a very minimum, there was evidence before the jury which, if believed, proved that while the third-party suit was in progress, the shipowners offered to settle first for $70,000 and later for $90,000. There was also evidence that Greenberg failed to relay either offer to plaintiff. In the subsequent malpractice suit, Moores claimed that he would have accepted the $90,000 offer had he been informed of it. Instead of a fat settlement, he received nothing but a rebuff from the jury.

This evidence was, we think, more than ample. In representing his client, an attorney has a duty to use that degree of skill, diligence, and judgment ordinarily to be expected of a member of the bar practicing in the same (or a similar) locale. Gans v. Mundy. . . . As part and parcel of this duty, a lawyer must keep his client seasonably apprised of relevant developments, including opportunities for settlement. . . .

Greenberg says that, even if this be true, the sums mentioned to him were too niggardly to be relayed. We need not decide today whether a lawyer has an obligation to transmit a patently unreasonable offer to his client. . . . The overtures which the defense made in the liability case were neither so totally divorced from a realistic appraisal of the merits nor so unresponsive to the upside and the downside of the litigation that they could blithely be ignored. The ongoing risk/reward calculus had many variables, some of an imponderable nature. These manifold uncertainties added up to at least one bit of certitude: the shipowners' $90,000 offer could not be said, as a matter of law, to be a patently ridiculous one. On this scumbled record, the district court did not err in permitting the jury to determine whether reasonably competent counsel would have informed Moores of the $90,000 offer and whether the client, had he been told, would have clasped it to his bosom.

[. . .]

IV. CONCLUSION.

. . . We conclude that this suit was properly assigned to the jury calendar; that the evidence of negligence was adequate to warrant jury submission; and that the liability finding in plaintiff's favor was supportable. . . . Accordingly, neither of the cross appeals has merit. We therefore leave the parties as we found them.

Affirmed. No costs.