Lawyer Doesn’t Owe Non-Client Duty of Care, NJ High Court Says

[Special thanks to Joel C. Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.]

A New Jersey lawyer doesn’t need to provide a duty of care to a non-client in a legal malpractice case involving defective wills, the NJ Supreme Court ruled.

The court adopted the standard set in the Restatement (Third) of the Law Governing Lawyers—the mix of state laws and ethics codes that stems in large part from the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct—as it affirmed a ruling from a panel with the NJ courts’ appellate division.

The non-client in the case, Helen Christakos, didn’t rely on attorney Anthony Boyadjis’s legal opinion, an “essential element” under the ethics rules in question, said Justice Rachel Wainer Apter said on behalf of a unanimous court.

In 2017, Helen Christakos emailed Boyadjis with a request to assist her uncles, Peter and Nick Christakos, to get their wills and estates in order. Before Peter and Nick died in April of 2018, Boyadjis admits that he erroneously told Peter that, under an earlier 2003 will, if one brother pre-deceased the other, the children of all their eight siblings would inherit part of his estate, the judge said.

He also admitted that Nick’s and Peter’s 2018 wills, which he drew up, mistakenly conveyed only their personal property to a surviving brother, not the entire estate.

Helen Christakos, who said she was unaware that she was an heir under her uncles’ “mirror-image” 2003 will, and her mother, Despina “Alice” Christakos, alleged that Boyadjis breached the duty of care he owed them as beneficiaries under the wills.

The court has expressed concern that allowing non-clients to sue attorneys for legal malpractice won’t serve the legitimate purpose of creating a remedy for a non-client, “‘but instead will become a weapon used to chill the entirely appropriate zealous advocacy on which our system of justice depends,’” Wainer Apter said.

Though the rules regarding non-client third-parties haven’t been “clearly articulated,” she said the Law Governing Lawyers ethics code needs to be “expressly” adopted,” including the provision that lawyers owe a duty of care to non-clients when the lawyer’s client “invites the nonclient to rely on the lawyer’s opinion or provision of other legal services.”

The ethics rules also provide that a lawyer owes a duty of care to a non-client when the lawyer “knows that a client intends as one of the primary objectives of the representation that the lawyer’s services benefit the nonclient,” Wainter Apter said.

But Boyadjis didn’t owe a duty of care to Helen under either section of the ethics code, she said.

There’s “no genuine dispute regarding Helen’s lack of reliance on Boyadjis’s legal opinion, an essential element under Section 51(2)” of the code, she said.

There’s also no duty of care under Section 51(3)(a) of the code, she said, because no “reasonable jury” could find “clear and convincing evidence” that Boyadjis knew that Peter and Nick Christakos intended their 2018 wills to benefit Helen.

For more information see Sam Skolnik “Lawyer Doesn’t Owe Non-Client Duty of Care, NJ High Court Says,” Bloomberg Law, January 20, 2026.