Malpractice
Ed Fagan has been accused of abandoning personal injury clients in favor of the more lucrative Holocaust reparations cases. One personal injury client sued Fagan, and won a $3.2 million malpractice award. Fagan has also been accused of having wasted over $500,000 of his clients' money.
In 1998 Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of Federal District Court dismissed the federal lawsuit of Mr. Ortiz, noting that Mr. Fagan, his attorney, had "failed to prosecute" it for three years and had ignored court orders. The lawsuit of Mr. Ortiz, then a 49-year-old truck driver involved in a traffic accident, started in 1994, when Mr. Fagan filed a $35 million lawsuit on his behalf in federal court in Brooklyn and State Supreme Court, but Edward Fagan failed to pursue the case after 1996. Since then Edward Fagan did not even see or speak with his client.
In another case Mr. Fagan failed to submit a claim for Mr. Tom Giron to a New York state fund that compensates victims of uninsured motorists. Mr Giron was struck and severely injured in 1992 by a car reported stolen, but did not receive any compensation, because, according to Jeffrey Rubinton, the fund's president, a claim was never filed and "its records showed that such an action had not been pursued and that the statute of limitations on making one had long expired." Another client, Offer Salmoni, won a $167,000 malpractice judgment against Mr. Fagan, because Mr. Fagan repeatedly failed to make court appearances in his eviction case, and so the statute of limitations expired without refiling.
New Jersey ethics officials filed a misconduct complaint before a grievance committee against Mr. Fagan on behalf of Diane Gibbons, another former client, who complained that Mr. Fagan failed to submit required papers in her personal injury case, leading to its dismissal. During the proceedings Mr. Fagan was forced to admit that he failed to withdraw from suits that he could not pursue, excusing himself with the words: "I was in over my head a lot of the time."
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