## Facts

- Frieda Tydings served as trustee of a grantor trust created by Ricki Singer and resigned effective January 1, 1997, when Singer’s brother became successor trustee.
- Tydings did not provide an accounting for more than six years after resigning.
- On August 20, 2003, Singer filed a Surrogate’s Court petition to compel an accounting from Tydings and the successor trustee.
- Tydings retained Greenfield, Stein & Senior, LLP (GSS), which appeared but did not answer the petition or assert a statute of limitations defense.
- The Surrogate ordered Tydings to account; after she did, Singer filed objections.
- With new counsel, Tydings moved to dismiss the objections based on CPLR 213(1)’s six-year limitations period.
- The Surrogate denied dismissal on two grounds: (1) the limitations period had not expired before the accounting proceeding began; and (2) the defense was waived as untimely.
- The Appellate Division affirmed solely on waiver, holding Tydings waived the limitations defense by not raising it in response to the petition to compel an accounting.
- Tydings sued GSS for legal malpractice, alleging that timely assertion of the limitations defense would have resulted in dismissal of the accounting proceeding as time-barred.
- GSS moved to dismiss, arguing collateral estoppel based on the Surrogate’s alternative merits ruling on limitations.

## Issues

1. Whether collateral estoppel bars Tydings’s malpractice claim based on the Surrogate’s alternative ruling rejecting the statute-of-limitations defense on the merits, when the appellate affirmance rested only on waiver.
2. When the statute of limitations begins to run for a proceeding to compel a former trustee to account after resignation and succession.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of GSS’s motion to dismiss, allowing the malpractice action to proceed.
- Collateral estoppel did not apply to the Surrogate’s alternative limitations ruling because it was not “necessarily decided” in the final judgment affirmed on appeal.
- The limitations period to compel a resigned trustee to account runs from the date the trusteeship is turned over to a successor trustee.
- Applying that rule, the six-year period began January 1, 1997 and had expired before Singer commenced the proceeding on August 20, 2003.

## Legal Principles

- Collateral estoppel requires that the identical issue was necessarily decided in the prior action and that the party had a full and fair opportunity to litigate it.
- A trial-level ruling offered as an alternative ground, and not addressed by an appellate court that affirms on a different ground, is not “necessarily decided” for issue-preclusion purposes.
- For an action to compel an accounting from a former trustee, accrual occurs upon turnover of the trusteeship to a successor; the six-year period runs from that date.
- In legal malpractice, a plaintiff must plead attorney negligence, proximate causation, and damages, including that a meritorious claim or defense would have succeeded but for counsel’s error.

## Conclusion

The court held that an unreviewed alternative trial-court ruling on limitations did not preclude relitigation in a later malpractice case, and it set a clear accrual rule for compelling a resigned trustee’s accounting: the six-year period runs from the date the trustee turns the trust over to a successor, making the underlying accounting petition untimely on these facts.


Tydings v. Greenfield, Stein & Senior, LLP, 11 N.Y.3d 195 (N.Y. 2008)