Incomprehensible Hodgepodge Dooms Malpractice Suit

The Montana Supreme Court affirmed the grant of summary judgment to the defendant in a legal maplractice case.

The pro se plaintiff sought a modest $12 million in damages but failed to identify an expert and gave insufficient responses to discovery requests.

Wylie’s complaint against Balaz was over forty pages long and asked for millions of dollars in damages. The District Court found, however, that the complaint “contains no discernable facts in support of her allegations of legal malpractice” and that Balaz’s discovery requests were “appropriate questions” in a legal malpractice case. Any party to civil litigation has an obligation to provide required responses to discovery requests, and yet after almost a year and an order from the District Court, Wylie did not answer “the most basic discovery requests to show that she had any evidence in support of her claim.” Wylie simply re-served her first incomplete and inadequate discovery responses, but included additional material that the District Court described as a “hodgepodge of sheets of paper that are not identified in any way, not specifically referenced to any discovery answers, and all of which are totally incomprehensible.”

(Mike Frisch)