Personal injury lawsuit dismissed due to lawyer's error.
Kentucky law says that if you want to sue someone for a personal injury you must both file suit AND attempt to serve your summons within one year from the date of the injury (KRS 423.140). You can't just file suit and place a summons in the file, you have to attempt to serve it. Unfortunately for a Plaintiff in Jefferson County, her attorney didn't do the second part. The Court of Appeals in Hearn v. Family Dollar found that the Jefferson Circuit Judge was correct in dismissing Plaintiff's suit as barred by Kentucky's statute of limitations. What's really frustrating is that the trial court tried to help out Plaintiff by attempting to grant her a ten day extension. Again her attorney failed at attempting service!
Plaintiff's counsel represented that she intentionally didn't attempt to serve the summons as the parties were in ongoing negotiations to settle the case. That may have been a valid excuse but the problem was defense counsel denied the existence of any negotiations. Plaintiff failed to produce correspondence or a single email to substantiate her claim of pending negotiations. An unfortunate outcome for Plaintiff due to an avoidable error on behalf of her attorney.
