SCOTT B. GARNER

Scott B. Garner jokes that prominent players in the two trials he has coming up in spring and summer are evil stepmothers.

He primarily defends attorneys and law firms against claims of legal malpractice, and lately, many of those matters have grown out of underlying trust and estate litigation. “There’s just some crazy family dynamic” in the cases, he said, typically a second wife battling the late husband’s children from a prior marriage. “And I’ve had to become somewhat of an expert in probate law.”

The two cases are similar in many ways. Both grew out of intrafamily litigation, now settled, over dividing the deceased father’s large estate. One side of each family now accuses its attorney of doing something wrong and is suing to recover the legal fees spent fighting with the other side. “In each case, it’s between $10 and $20 million in legal fees … which, by the way, ate up a significant portion of the estate.”

One trial is set to begin May 1, and the other is tentatively scheduled for July.

A few years ago, Garner won a complete defense verdict from an Orange County Superior Court jury on behalf of an attorney who had represented a hospital that had withdrawn a doctor’s privileges and refused to reinstate them. He had to retry the underlying arbitration during the trial.

“We convinced the jury that the lawyer had not committed malpractice.” His team also won a crossclaim for some of the attorney’s fees the client never paid.

In February last year, he and partner Thomas Umberg won a $47 million judgment by suing a lawyer. “I’d never been on that side of that kind of case,” Garner said. “But I really liked the client and I thought the behavior of the lawyer was particularly egregious.”

The lawyer had represented Garner’s client in business deals for more than 10 years but then switched to represent a competitor vying for another deal. The matter began as a disqualification motion but once the deal closed, they converted it to a damages lawsuit. Park v. Law Offices of Tracey Buck-Walsh, SCV-259791 (Sonoma Super. Ct., filed Nov. 23, 2016).

In one large pending case, he is defending a lawyer who had represented Jeffrey and Paulette Carpoff, the perpetrators of a $910 million Ponzi scheme involving securities in solar generator companies.

He also advises attorneys and firms with ethics questions, serves as an expert witness on ethics and standard of care issues and several times a year represents attorneys in State Bar discipline matters.

Garner is a former chair of the State Bar Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct and a current member of the California Lawyers Association Ethics Committee. And for about 15 years, he has been a co-chair of the Orange County Bar Association’s ethics committee. “I was OC bar president one year, and I got to appoint myself as chair, but I’d been chair for a while, so it seemed OK.”

– Don DeBenedictis