Conflicts of Interest and Breach of Fiduciary Duty: When Attorney Loyalty Crosses the Line in Texas
Legal Malpractice
Your lawyer promised to “fight to the end,” but as soon as a quick, discounted settlement hits the table, the pressure campaign starts and your questions are brushed off. When you later discover fee terms, side relationships, or business ties that were never clearly explained, a top-rated Houston legal malpractice attorney at The Kassab Law Firm can analyze whether attorney loyalty crossed the line into legal malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty. To see whether that happened in your situation, it helps to understand how Texas defines conflicts of interest and fiduciary duty, what real-world warning signs look like, and how malpractice lawyers build these cases when loyalty goes off course.
Fiduciary Duty and Conflicts in Texas
Texas lawyers do not just owe you “competent representation.” They owe fiduciary duties of loyalty, honesty, and confidentiality, and courts have treated those duties as stricter than ordinary contract obligations. For example, the Texas Supreme Court in Burrow v. Arce held that when lawyers breach fiduciary duty such as pushing clients into a group settlement for the firm’s own financial reasons, clients may seek forfeiture of fees even without proving traditional damages, because loyalty itself has legal value.
The conflict rules reinforce those duties. Under Rule 1.06 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules, a lawyer generally cannot represent parties whose interests are “directly adverse” in the same or a substantially related matter unless strict disclosure and consent requirements are satisfied. So if your attorney originally handled a business deal for you and later represents your rival in a dispute over the same deal, using inside knowledge from your file, that is a concrete example of loyalty crossing the line. In that kind of situation, Texas legal malpractice attorneys look at whether you were told about the conflict, whether you truly agreed, and whether the representation harmed you.
How Attorney Behavior Turns Into Breach of Fiduciary Duty
In practice, a breach of fiduciary duty rarely appears as one dramatic event; it usually shows up as a pattern of choices that favor someone other than the client. For example, imagine a lawyer in a mass-tort case who urges hundreds of clients to accept a global settlement, not because each outcome is fair, but because a quick resolution guarantees a large contingent fee and clears the firm’s inventory of cases. That kind of conduct is exactly what Burrow v. Arce addressed, and the court allowed fee forfeiture as a remedy for disloyal behavior.
Another example involves fee contracts. In Hoover Slovacek LLP v. Walton, the Texas Supreme Court scrutinized a contingent-fee provision that made it very costly for a client to change counsel mid-case and signaled that fee agreements are evaluated through the lens of fiduciary duty, not purely private bargaining. When an attorney drafts a contract that traps you financially if you question their work, that may signal a breach of loyalty as well as a contract problem. Texas legal malpractice lawyers often review these agreements to see whether the structure of the fee itself pushed the lawyer to recommend choices that were better for the firm than for the client.
In smaller cases, a conflict can be as simple as a lawyer representing both sides of a small business breakup “to save money,” then quietly guiding the weaker owner into signing a buyout that heavily favors the stronger owner, without ever giving clear, separate advice. For clients who later discover that the same lawyer coached both parties through the deal, malpractice lawyers look at whether the dual representation was permitted, whether informed consent was real, and whether the outcome would likely have been different with independent counsel.
The Kassab Law Firm Should Be Your Next Move
When conflicts of interest, hidden relationships, or self-serving fee structures have warped your case, you do not have to decode legal malpractice in Texas on your own. The Kassab Law Firm and its legal malpractice lawyers Houston, TX can assess whether disloyal conduct cost you money or opened the door to remedies such as fee forfeiture. If you are ready to hold a former lawyer accountable, contact us today to begin a focused, confidential review of your rights.