Smith v. Knight’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently June 2015
23 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 City of Houston v. Clear Creek Basin Authority · Smith v. Knight
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“is not a plea of confession and avoidance of the statute of limitations,” but Smith states the contrary: "the client had failed to meet his summary judgment burden of pleading and proof of the ‘discovery rule’ as an affirmative defense to the statute of limitations.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“However, the court of civil appeals also wrote that the ‘discovery rule’ applies to this legal malpractice case, because of the existence of a fiduciary relationship between the client and his attorney. Because the client’s failure to controvert the motion for summary judgment is disposi-tive of the case, we do not reach the question of the applicability of the ‘discovery rule’ in legal malpractice cases.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Jimenez v. Maloney
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.