GREENAWAY, JR., Circuit Judge.
Nicholas Knopick ("Knopick") appeals the District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania's grant of summary judgment for Appellee Philip Downey ("Downey"), Esquire, on Knopick's legal malpractice tort and contract claims against Downey. Knopick claims that Downey committed malpractice in failing to prosecute a legal malpractice action on Knopick's behalf against John Connelly, Jr., Esquire, Susan M. Kadel, Esquire, and their law firm James, Smith, Durkin & Connelly, L.L.P. ("Connelly Defendants").
Knopick argues that the District Court should not have applied the occurrence rule to determine the start date of the statute of limitations for his claim against the Connelly Defendants; instead, the Court should have tolled the statute of limitations based on the discovery rule or fraudulent concealment doctrine. Knopick also argues that even applying the occurrence rule, the District Court erred in its ruling because he and Downey had entered into an attorney-client relationship before the statute of limitations had run.
We find that the District Court erred in granting summary judgment in favor of Downey based on its application of the occurrence rule to Knopick's underlying claim against the Connelly Defendants. We will apply the discovery rule to Knopick's underlying claim and we subsequently find a genuine issue of fact as to when Knopick should have known of his injury and its cause under the discovery rule. We will reverse the decision of the District Court and remand Knopick's case for further proceedings, in accordance with this opinion.
On May 11, 1998, Knopick, a commercial pilot, and his wife, Darlene Knopick ("Dolly"), entered into a Separation and Property Settlement Agreement ("PSA" or the "Agreement") whereby Dolly would receive $60,000 from Knopick's retirement
Knopick retained the Connelly Defendants in 2004 to represent him in the matter. The Connelly Defendants told Knopick that the Agreement was valid, and that if it were set aside, he would only have to pay Dolly the amount that the stock was worth at the time he entered into the Agreement. On August 2, 2004, a PSA hearing was held before Judge Kathy A. Morrow in the Court of Common Pleas in Perry County, Pennsylvania, to determine whether Dolly was provided with full disclosure of Knopick's assets in 1998.
Before the hearing, Knopick told Connelly of four witnesses who could testify as to Dolly's knowledge of his assets at the time he entered into the PSA. The witnesses on the list were Dolly's lawyer, Carl Wass; Knopick's lawyer, Michael Hanft; the couple's accountant, Charles ("Chuck") Pegg; and his wife, Becky Pegg. Knopick claims that Connelly represented that he would contact the witnesses on the list, including Wall, Chuck Pegg, and Hanft. Prior to the PSA hearing, Dolly offered to settle the case, if Knopick would transfer $300,000 of his UPS stock to her. Based on advice from Connelly and Kadel, including Kadel's indication that they had a lot of evidence including tax returns, Knopick rejected the offer.
Neither Kadel nor Connelly met with Knopick prior to the hearing. On August 2, 2004, the date of the hearing, Knopick was informed that Kadel, not Connelly— whom he had expected to appear on his behalf—would represent him at the hearing. Kadel did not call any of the witnesses that Knopick had recommended. Kadel told Knopick that Connelly did not need to be there, that the other witnesses were not necessary because of the tax records, and that the Agreement would not be set aside.
In fact, only Knopick testified on his own behalf. Knopick denied committing any fraud or concealing his assets. He testified that Dolly was aware of the value of his stock and that she had access to all of his financial statements. He further stated that Dolly had access to his financial information each year when they prepared their joint tax returns with their accountant, Mr. Pegg.
Dolly and her sister, Carol Ann Chaft, testified on Dolly's behalf. Dolly testified that Knopick had acted fraudulently and had failed to disclose his assets. Dolly claimed that she thought Knopick only had a small amount of stocks and that she did not know their value. Dolly asserted that Knopick and Pegg did not share Knopick's financial information with her when they did the couple's taxes. She also testified that, at the time, she believed Mr. Hanft to be their family attorney. She professed that she never consulted with Wass about Knopick's assets before signing the Agreement.
After the hearing, Kadel told Knopick that it had gone well. Connelly told Knopick later that the hearing "was not a big deal and that any competent attorney could handle it." (App. at 476.) Over the next few months when Knopick spoke to Connelly and Kadel, they told him that there was nothing to worry about, and
On July 28, 2006,
On October 26, 2006, Downey sent a letter to the Connelly Defendants stating, in part, the following:
(App. at 523.) On March 30, 2007, five months later, Downey asked Knopick to sign an official agreement to file suit on the malpractice claim, which Knopick did. However, Downey did not file the lawsuit.
On July 6, 2009, Knopick filed suit against the Connelly Defendants, claiming legal malpractice under a breach of contract theory. In that complaint, Knopick also brought claims against Downey, alleging legal malpractice under both tort and contract theories of liability. On July 22, 2009, the Connelly Defendants moved to dismiss Knopick's claim against them. On December 29, 2009, the District Court granted this motion. It found that Knopick's claim against the Connelly Defendants was grounded in tort, not contract. The tort claim was thus subject to a two-year statute of limitations which had run, with regard to Knopick's claims against them, regardless of the start date of the statute of limitations, an issue which the Court explicitly did not decide. Knopick v. Connelly, Civil No. 09-1287, 2009 WL 5214975, at *1 (M.D.Pa. Dec. 29, 2009). Knopick did not file a timely appeal of that ruling.
On October 21, 2009, Downey filed a motion for summary judgment on Knopick's claims against him. The District Court granted the motion on January 25, 2010. In his motion, Downey argued that Knopick's claims must fail because Downey and the Connelly Defendants did not cause Knopick to suffer economic damages and because the PSA was the product of Knopick's own fraud. In a footnote, Downey noted that if Knopick's claims survived summary judgment, a critical factor in determining his tort claim would be when the applicable statute of limitations began to run—at the August 2004 hearing or at the time of Knopick's notice of the state court's July 2005 order. Knopick addressed the statute of limitations argument in his brief in response, claiming that the statute did not commence until the court's order, and that Downey, whom he retained in March 2007, was therefore retained within the two-year tort statute of limitations.
The District Court granted Downey's motion for summary judgment on Knopick's tort claim on the statute of limitations ground,
The District Court had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332, due to diversity of citizenship of the parties. We have jurisdiction over this appeal, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291.
We exercise plenary review over a district court's grant of summary judgment and apply the same standard of whether genuine issues as to material fact exist such that a reasonable jury could return a verdict for the plaintiff. Fed. R.Civ.P. 56(a). Debiec v. Cabot Corp., 352 F.3d 117, 128 (3d Cir.2003). We must "view the record and draw inferences in a light most favorable to the non-moving party." In re IKON Office Solutions, Inc., 277 F.3d 658, 666 (3d Cir.2002).
State tolling principles "are generally to be used by a federal court when it is applying a state limitations period;" therefore, we look to Pennsylvania law, predicting how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would resolve the statute of limitations issue. Debiec, 352 F.3d at 128 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); Jewelcor, Inc. v. Karfunkel, 517 F.3d 672, 676 n. 4 (3d Cir.2008). "When ascertaining Pennsylvania law, the decisions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court are the authoritative source." Spence v. ESAB Group, Inc., 623 F.3d 212, 216 (3d Cir. 2010). When making a prediction as to how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would rule, we "must look to decisions of state intermediate appellate courts, of federal courts interpreting that state's law, and of other state supreme courts that have addressed the issue," among other sources. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Norfolk S. Ry. Co. v. Basell USA Inc., 512 F.3d 86, 92 (3d Cir. 2008)).
Pennsylvania imposes a two-year statute of limitations on tortious conduct, including legal malpractice actions. 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 5524. Pennsylvania favors strict application of statutes of limitations. Glenbrook Leasing Co. v. Beausang, 839 A.2d 437, 441 (Pa.Super.Ct.2003), appeal granted in part, 582 Pa. 101, 870 A.2d 318 (2005) and order aff'd without opinion, 584 Pa. 129, 881 A.2d 1266 (2005). "Whether the statute has run on a claim is usually a question of law for the trial judge, but where the issue involves a factual determination, the determination is for the jury." Foulke v. Dugan, 187 F.Supp.2d 253, 258-59 (E.D.Pa.2002) (quoting Hayward v. Med. Ctr. of Beaver Cnty., 530 Pa. 320, 608 A.2d 1040 (1992)).
Knopick argues that instead of the occurrence rule, the Court should have applied the discovery rule in deciding the statute of limitations issue on his claim against the Connelly Defendants. Alternatively, Knopick argues that the Connelly Defendants would have been equitably estopped from asserting a statute of limitations defense based on the doctrine of fraudulent concealment.
The discovery rule is historically "grounded on considerations of basic fairness." Taylor v. Tukanowicz, 290 Pa.Super. 581, 435 A.2d 181, 183 (1981) (citing Ayers v. Morgan, 397 Pa. 282, 154 A.2d 788 (1959)). It was first enunciated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a coal conversion action where the subsurface injury, defendant's removal of coal from plaintiff's property, was unknown to the plaintiff. The analysis focused on "the inability of the plaintiff, despite the exercise of diligence, to know of the trespass." Pocono, 468 A.2d at 471. This tolled the running of the statute, for "no amount of vigilance w[ould] enable him to detect the approach of a trespasser who may be working his way through the coal seams underlying adjoining lands." Id. (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Lewey v. H.C. Fricke Coke Co., 166 Pa. 536, 31 A. 261, 263-64 (1895)) ("He cannot reasonably be required to act until knowledge that action
Subsequently, the rule was principally applied in medical malpractice cases, notably one that involved the failure of a surgeon to remove a sponge after surgery. Ayers, 154 A.2d at 788 (citing Lewey, 31 A. at 261). The discovery rule was implicated based on the inability of the plaintiff to ascertain the presence of the sponge. This "prevent[ed] the commencement of the running of the statute, for `[c]ertainly he could not open his abdomen like a door and look in; certainly he would need to have medical advice and counsel.'" Pocono, 468 A.2d at 472 (quoting Ayers, 154 A.2d at 792). In Ayers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed the lower court's summary judgment order starting the statute of limitations at the time of surgery when the sponge was left in plaintiff's abdomen.
Pennsylvania courts have since applied the discovery rule to other types of actions under the same principle. See Anthony v. Koppers Co., Inc., 284 Pa.Super. 81, 425 A.2d 428, 436 (1980), rev'd on other grounds, 496 Pa. 119, 436 A.2d 181 (1981).
We also look to our Circuit's pronouncements regarding Pennsylvania's discovery rule in the context of medical malpractice and physical tort claims. We have found that the rule is "designed to `ameliorate the sometimes-harsh effects of the statute of limitations,' and it is often applied in medical malpractice and latent disease cases in which the plaintiff is unable to discover his or her injury until several years after the tort occurred." Mest v. Cabot Corp., 449 F.3d 502, 510 (3d Cir. 2006) (finding material issue of fact as to whether plaintiffs exercised reasonable diligence in determining cause of their cows' illness where plaintiffs relied on experts' advice and defendant's representation that its emissions from industrial facility were harmless) (citing Cathcart v. Keene Indus. Insulation, 324 Pa.Super. 123, 471 A.2d 493, 500 (1984)); see also Bohus, 950 F.2d at 919 (finding either discovery rule or fraudulent concealment tolled limitations period and evidence supported jury's conclusion that patient could not have discovered the cause of her injuries subsequent to bunion surgery until she consulted an orthopedic surgeon where original doctor assured her that the pain was result of normal healing process and plaintiff consulted other physicians who confirmed prognosis).
These principles are similarly applicable in the context of legal malpractice actions. Both Pennsylvania courts and federal courts within this Circuit have recognized the discovery rule's application in legal malpractice matters. In particular, the discovery rule has been applied in legal malpractice cases when the injured party is unable, despite the exercise of due diligence,
Since this is a matter of state law, we look to Pennsylvania state courts initially. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has acknowledged the occurrence rule in deciding when the statute of limitations should begin to run in the criminal defense context of a plaintiff's claim of legal malpractice, but to our knowledge, has not yet analyzed the discovery rule's application to legal malpractice in a civil suit. See Bailey v. Tucker, 533 Pa. 237, 621 A.2d 108, 115 (1993) ("with regard to the respective statutes of limitations, the rule in this Commonwealth is that the statutory period commences at the time the harm is suffered or, if appropriate, at the time the alleged malpractice is discovered") (citing Pocono, 468 A.2d at 471).
In Wachovia, the Pennsylvania Superior Court found that under the occurrence rule, plaintiff's legal malpractice and breach of contract causes of action against its attorney would have accrued at the time the attorney allegedly breached a duty owed when she failed to mark a judgment in a legal filing as "satisfied." 935 A.2d at 574. However, viewing the facts in the light most favorable to plaintiff, the court assumed that plaintiff, despite the exercise of due diligence, could not have reasonably been aware of this alleged breach until a third party initiated proceedings against the plaintiff for damages. The statute of limitations was therefore tolled from the time of the failure to mark the judgment until the third party's lawsuit against Wachovia two years later, in which the damages regarding the failure to mark were asserted. Plaintiff's delay in filing its malpractice claim until final resolution of the third party lawsuit nine years later was not excused by the discovery rule, because the plaintiff was reasonably aware of the malpractice when the third party claim was first filed.
In Beausang, 839 A.2d at 437, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the trial court's application of the discovery rule in delaying the start of the statute of limitations in a legal malpractice action. The case involved a leasing company that retained defendant Butera, Beausang, Cohen & Brennan ("BBCB"), a law firm, to prepare an agreement of sale and deed in connection with plaintiff's purchase of office space from a condominium association. The agreement of sale included language that parking spaces would be included in the sale, but the deed contained no such language. Six years after the sale, a dispute arose between the plaintiff and the condominium association regarding the use of the parking spaces due to the lack of title transfer of the spaces. The condominium association sent a letter to defendant BBCB accusing it of malpractice, a copy of which was sent to the plaintiff.
At that time, plaintiff Glenbrook sought a second opinion from another firm which advised that Glenbrook may have a malpractice claim against BBCB. Following a bench trial five years later in the action between Glenbrook and the condominium association, in which the court ruled in the condominium association's favor, Glenbrook filed suit against BBCB. Glenbrook claimed that the two-year statute of limitations for malpractice should be tolled until the resolution of the bench trial.
The superior court held that it would be unreasonable to expect the individuals that constituted the plaintiff, non-attorneys, to learn of the injury of the firm's deficiency in the deed or the operation of the real estate doctrine of merger at the time that the sale occurred and the deed was conveyed to the plaintiff. It made this finding notwithstanding the reference to the parking spaces in the agreement of sale. The court found that the plaintiff acquired knowledge of the harm—and the statute of limitations began to run—when the condominium association sent Glenbrook the copy of the letter to BBCB accusing BBCB of legal malpractice and Glenbrook sought a second legal opinion which confirmed that Glenbrook had a possible legal action against BBCB.
The nettlesome issue is how to differentiate between instances when application of the discovery rule is appropriate or not. Where "reasonable minds would not differ in finding that a party knew or should have known on the exercise of reasonable diligence of his injury and its cause," Fine, 870 A.2d at 858-59, a court should determine, as a matter of law, that the discovery rule does not apply. "`[T]he point of time at which the injured party should reasonably be aware that he or she has suffered an injury is generally an issue of fact to be determined by the jury.... Only where the facts are so clear that reasonable minds cannot differ may the commencement of the limitation period be determined as a matter of law.'" Coregis Ins. Co. v. Baratta & Fenerty, Ltd., 264 F.3d 302, 307 (3d Cir.2001) (quoting Sadtler v. Jackson-Cross Co., 402 Pa.Super. 492, 587 A.2d 727, 732 (1991)).
Reasonable diligence is an objective test, Kach v. Hose, 589 F.3d 626, 642 n. 17 (3d Cir.2009), but it is also "sufficiently flexible to take into account the differences between persons and their capacity to meet certain situations and the circumstances confronting them at the time in question." Id. at 641 (quoting Miller, 463 F.3d at 276) (internal quotation marks omitted). "[I]n this context, reasonable diligence is not an absolute standard, but is what is expected from a party who has been given reason to inform himself of the facts upon which his right to recovery is premised." Fine, 870 A.2d at 858. Demonstrating the expected diligence requires a plaintiff to establish a display of "those qualities of attention, knowledge, intelligence, and judgment which society requires of its members for the protection of their own interests and the interests of others." Wilson v. El-Daief, 600 Pa. 161, 964 A.2d 354, 363 n. 6 (2009) (citation omitted). Although there are few facts which diligence cannot discover, there must be "some reason to awaken inquiry and direct diligence in the channel in which it would be successful." Urland v. Merrell-Dow Pharms., Inc., 822 F.2d 1268, 1271 (3d Cir.1987) (quoting Deemer v. Weaver, 324 Pa. 85, 187 A. 215, 216 (1936)); see also Debiec, 352 F.3d 117.
Knopick argues that the statute of limitations for his malpractice action against the Connelly Defendants was tolled until, at the earliest, July 7, 2005, the date of the state court's order mandating relief to Dolly. He contends that he did not discover his injury until after this date. He believed everything had gone well at the hearing based on the Connelly Defendants' assurances, both immediately after the hearing and over the succeeding months. Knopick did not believe that his agreement would be set aside. Knopick argues that this state of affairs affected his ability to discover his injury and that, until the court's ruling,
Knopick relies primarily on Fine, one of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's most recent iterations of the discovery rule, which is a consolidated medical malpractice case that involved a plaintiff's inability to discover his injury through due diligence. In Fine, Defendant Dr. Checcio surgically extracted Fine's wisdom teeth. Fine experienced symptoms including pain, bleeding, infection, swelling, and numbness on both sides of his face, but considered these conditions to be normal, based on advice from Dr. Checcio. All symptoms except the numbness subsided. According to Fine, during his office visits with Dr. Checcio in the months that followed, Dr. Checcio repeatedly told Fine that it would take six months for the numbness to subside. Some numbness still continued on the left side of his lip and chin. When his symptoms continued a year after the surgery, Fine came to believe that the persistent numbness was abnormal.
Dr. Checcio moved for summary judgment based on the statute of limitations running from the time of the surgery, a motion the trial court denied without opinion. The jury returned a verdict for Mr. Fine. On appeal, Dr. Checcio argued that the trial court erred in denying her motion for summary judgment. The Pennsylvania Superior Court agreed and reversed the judgment for Fine. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed the superior court, finding that the grant of summary judgment was improper. Responding to Dr. Checcio's argument that the discovery rule did not apply as a matter of law because Fine was aware of the surgery and knew that his face was numb immediately after, the court found that, whether Fine should have known through reasonable diligence that his numbness could have been a temporary
Knopick argues that, as in Fine, a jury should decide whether a reasonable and diligent person should have immediately known that the failure to call witnesses at a hearing, in this context, was normal. He claims that, as a lay person, he was unable to know and understand that he had suffered an injury prior to speaking with other counsel.
Downey insists that the statute of limitations began to run at the time of the PSA hearing on August 2, 2004, not when the court issued its July 7, 2005 order or sometime thereafter. He claims that Knopick was fully aware of his alleged injury at the hearing when the Connelly defendants did not call the witnesses he suggested to testify. He further claims in his brief in response, and at oral argument, that reliance on Pennsylvania medical malpractice cases is improper, because medical malpractice is treated differently than legal malpractice, but offers no meaningful support for that distinction.
The District Court below relied in part upon three district court decisions in deciding when the statute of limitations began to run at the time of the PSA hearing and not when Judge Morrow issued her order. However, these cases did not address attorney assurances; instead they involved some adverse action or ruling made by the court against the plaintiff to trigger the plaintiff's awareness of injury and cause, or the alleged breach of duty (or the plaintiff's reaction to it) was obvious enough in nature to suggest that the plaintiff should have been aware of the complained-of injury and its cause.
In the first, a district court found that the statute of limitations for malpractice, based on the attorney's failure to obtain an expert witness, failure to depose witnesses, and failure to represent plaintiffs' interests by demanding an additional $10,000, began on the day the plaintiffs received written notice from the attorney that the court had denied their motion to enlarge discovery to permit opinions of the expert and that they sought $10,000 to cover anticipated expenses. Saferstein v. Paul, Mardinly, Durham, James, Flandreau & Rodger, P.C., No. Civ. A 96-4488, 1997 WL 102521, at *4 (E.D.Pa. Feb. 28, 1997), aff'd without opinion, 127 F.3d 1096 (3d Cir.1997).
In that case, the court's denial of counsel's motion for discovery disallowing the expert, a ruling against the plaintiff, and defendants' request for an additional $10,000 were apparently construed by the court as being indicative of potential malpractice at the time. Although that case is not binding, we cannot find that the alleged conduct of malpractice in the instant case, as a matter of law, indicated injury or should have triggered investigation of injury to Knopick.
The District Court relied on another unpublished decision, Carlisle v. Bartony, Hare and Edson, No. Civ. 04-25, 2006 WL 2226029, at *1 (W.D.Pa. Aug. 2, 2006), in which the court found that an attorney's withdrawal of two of plaintiff's claims during trial, and at a minimum the jury verdict, served as the start of the statute of limitations for plaintiff's claim of legal malpractice for: (1) his attorney's failure to discover and introduce a deed solidifying his property rights; (2) withdrawal of the two claims; and (3) the low amount of damages verdict. Though the court did not include the entire factual background or discuss alleged attorney assurances, it concluded that the plaintiff was fully aware of each of these failures when they happened. The court discussed the discovery rule in finding that the plaintiff, at a minimum, was aware of the injuries and their cause as of the date the verdict was reached, though it did not save the late filing of his claim, more than five years after the jury verdict.
Finally, the District Court cited to Pettit v. Smith, 241 B.R. 847 (E.D.Pa.1999). There, the plaintiff asserted that the statute of limitations for her legal malpractice claim should commence when her wages were first garnished by the IRS based on tax returns she signed two years earlier. She claimed that her attorneys failed to advise her that these were joint returns with her husband. Although the factual recitation was brief, the court rejected that argument because it found that the plaintiff's deposition testimony and brief made clear that she knew or should have known when she signed income the tax returns
Despite the fact that the injury in Fine, as a medical one, is distinguishable, the supreme court's approach there relies on the same principles for consideration of the discovery rule and is thereby instructive. The act of malpractice Knopick now claims is the Connelly Defendants' failure to call witnesses at the hearing. The approach in Fine, suggests we must address Knopick's ability, exercising reasonable diligence, to know of his subsequent injury and its cause. See Fine, 870 A.2d at 861 (citing Pocono, 468 A.2d at 471). A close look at the facts is necessary to the determination of this appeal.
Of critical importance in this case is the distinction between the act constituting the alleged breach—the Connelly Defendants' failure to call witnesses, which would start the statute under the occurrence rule— and the injury that flowed from this failure, constructive knowledge of which would trigger the statute of limitations under the discovery rule. The District Court, in applying the occurrence rule, conflated this distinction to some degree when it stated that plaintiff knew or should have known of "the alleged malpractice," what it described as the Connelly Defendants' failure to call witnesses, as of the date of the hearing. (App. at 11.)
Although it is undisputed that Knopick knew the witnesses were not called, it remains in dispute, and a question which we believe a jury should decide, when Knopick knew that he was injured as a result of the witnesses not being called. In this case, we believe the District Court inappropriately equates the breach of duty (or "alleged malpractice" action) with the injury suffered from that breach.
Given the Pennsylvania courts' pronouncements of the discovery rule, as well as its application by federal courts within our Circuit, we cannot conclude as a matter of law that Knopick's injury, due to the failure to call witnesses, was readily ascertainable on the hearing date in light of his counsel's assurances that the witnesses were not necessary and that the hearing had gone well. As in many of these cases, Knopick's attorney (in the underlying legal dispute) took an action he now claims was a breach of duty, the negative impact of which was not necessarily known to him until a later date.
Beausang, Wachovia, and Robbins suggest that it would be inequitable to, in all cases, place the onus on a lay person to know that he has been injured by his counsel's decisions and start the running of the statute of limitations on his malpractice claim at that time. These Pennsylvania Superior Court decisions in the first instance, in addition to Fine and its progeny, support an application of the discovery rule. Although the discovery rule has evolved in its application, its purpose has remained the same. A plaintiff, unable to know of his injury or its cause because nothing has yet put him on notice of such injury, should not be held responsible for investigating until something gives him reason to do so.
We conclude that the district court erred in finding, as a matter of law, that the limitations period in Knopick's claim was triggered as of the August 2, 2004 state court hearing. Applying the discovery rule, we find that a jury could disagree as to whether Knopick reasonably knew or should have known of his injury before the court entered its order against Knopick on July 5, 2005. We therefore find that the District Court erred in granting summary judgment in Downey's favor based on its application of the occurrence rule. We will reverse the District Court's grant of summary judgment for Mr. Downey, and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Bailey v. Tucker, 533 Pa. 237, 621 A.2d 108, 112 (1993). Because the Court found that the statute of limitations for Knopick's claim against the Connelly Defendants had already run when Knopick retained Downey, it found that Knopick could not have met part two of a tort claim because Downey acted as a reasonable attorney would have under the circumstances in not bringing an expired claim.
In O'Brien v. Eli Lilly, consistent with the principle articulated in other medical malpractice cases, we found that the plaintiff failed to present sufficient evidence to permit a jury to find that she could not reasonably have possessed the salient facts concerning the occurrence of her injury and who or what caused it since she was able to do so upon inquiring with her mother and her doctor two years later.
Acknowledging that "the date a defendant becomes aware that his counsel may have been responsible for the harm will likely be harder to pinpoint," the court decided that "[n]onetheless, it is necessary to establish a point from which the statute of limitations period will commence," which it determined to be the end of the attorney-client relationship, since the aggrieved defendant would then be "aware of the injury (i.e., the conviction), and ... on clear notice to investigate any alternate cause of that harm which he believes to exist." Id. In that regard, the court found "the defendant is not unlike the medical patient who becomes aware of an injury and is then placed on notice to discover its cause." Id.
On remand to the district court, we pointed to the Bankruptcy Code's encouragement that debtors-in-possession retain lawyers and noted that "the existence of a fiduciary relationship is relevant to a discovery rule analysis precisely because it entails such a presumptive level of trust in the fiduciary by the principal that it may take a `smoking gun' to excite searching inquiry on the principal's part into its fiduciary's behavior." Id. at 343 (recognizing that the existence of a fiduciary, lawyer-client relationship and fiduciary's abuse of that relationship by themselves did not preclude judgment as a matter of law, but that "the presence of a fiduciary relationship would be pertinent to the question of when a plaintiff's duty to investigate arose.") (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Gurfein v. Sovereign Grp., 826 F.Supp. 890, 919 n. 31 (E.D.Pa.1993)).
