Gale v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently May 2025
9 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on 92 Ill. 2d 13 - Pelham v. Griesheimer · 102 Ill. 2d 356 - Ogle v. Fuiten · 131 Ill. 2d 509 - McLane v. Russell · 276 Ill. App. 3d 590 - Goran v. Glieberman · 99 Ill. 2d 312 - York v. Stiefel
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[p]laintiff simply cannot allege that the primary reason her son hired the defendant attorney was to change her status from contingent beneficiary on the employer-provided plans to primary beneficiary. At best, plaintiff is only an incidental beneficiary of the attorney-client relationship, and an incidental beneficiary is not qualified to bring a malpractice action of this character. [Citation.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“The fact that plaintiff may have indirectly benefitted from defendant's representation of her son does not mean, as plaintiff argues, that the attorney thereby owes a duty to her.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.