Yang v. Simas CA3

Filed 5/20/22 Yang v. Simas CA3 NOT TO BE PUBLISHED California Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or relying on opinions not certified for publication or ordered published, except as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This opinion has not been certified for publication or ordered published for purposes of rule 8.1115.

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA THIRD APPELLATE DISTRICT (Sacramento) ----

BIN YANG, C093348

Plaintiff and Appellant, (Super. Ct. No. 34-2019- 00264048-CU-PN-GDS) v.

STEVEN L. SIMAS et al.,

Defendants and Respondents.

This appeal involves an attorney-client relationship that broke down over a decade ago. In late 2011, Bin Yang hired attorney Steven L. Simas to help her challenge a decision from the Medical Board of California. Yang, who graduated from a medical college in China, had applied for a license to practice medicine in California. But the Medical Board denied her application for three reasons. First, it found Yang failed to prove her medical education was sufficient to support licensure in California. Second, it found Yang had multiple criminal convictions, including a 1995 theft conviction and a 2005 assault conviction. And third, it found Yang had engaged in unprofessional conduct

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when she held herself out as a medical doctor even though she did not have a medical license. After Yang hired Simas, Simas filed (on Yang’s behalf) a petition for writ of mandate seeking to vacate the Medical Board’s decision. But shortly after, the parties’ relationship quickly deteriorated. In early 2012, in a motion to withdraw as counsel, Simas accused Yang of failing to cooperate, of failing to pay her bills, and of being disrespectful to staff. A month later, Yang leveled accusations of her own against Simas. In a letter to the State Bar of California, she accused Simas of being a “fraud” with an office “set up to create unnecessary legal procedures to rip off clients.” She reasoned that Simas told her he believed her case had merit but then, after charging for unnecessary “legal activities,” said her case lacked merit. A year after Yang sent her letter to the State Bar, and after Simas again moved to withdraw as counsel, the trial court granted Simas’s motion to withdraw.1 Nearly six years after all these events, in 2019, Yang filed this current suit against Simas and Simas & Associates, Ltd. (Respondents) for fraud and legal malpractice. As in this appeal, Yang represented herself without counsel. She alleged, as she had alleged in her letter to the State Bar, that Respondents charged her for unnecessary “legal activities” and engaged in fraud. She also faulted Respondents for the dismissal of her suit against the Medical Board, which had been dismissed in 2017 based on her failure to prosecute the case. But the trial court, after Respondents filed a demurrer, found both Yang’s causes of action barred under the applicable statutes of limitations. It found Yang’s fraud claim barred under the three-year statute of limitations in Code of Civil Procedure section 338, subdivision (d), and it found her legal malpractice claim barred under the one-year statute of limitations in Code of Civil Procedure section 340.6 (section