A disciplinary committee said it lacked probable cause to charge a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer from Jacksonville, though it described his billing standards as “not consistent with the high standards of our profession.” [ABA Journal, Florida Times-Union]
6 Comments
“high standards”
That phrase does not mean what they think it means…
He didn’t charge time and a half for overtime?
Bob
“High standards” mean ya got caught.
The decision by the disciplinary committee and the “support of ‘numerous judges’ in Northeast Florida” is the penultimate answer to this post: http://overlawyered.com/2010/11/forthcoming-the-lawyer-judge-bias-in-the-american-legal-system/
As an Army officer, we had a saying that when you failed to enforce the standards you had set a new (lower) standard.
actually the moment i saw that it reminded me of something i saw in my company, which deals with home care.
We had a nurse bill 23 hours of work, or something like that. How? Well, the particulars of the story are lost to the fog of memory, but the answer went some pretty close to this. She came to see the patient at 10 in the morning. but the patient then suddenly needed to go to the hospital. So at the patient’s request she came with her, and stayed with her all night, and left at 9 am. So then the stupid data entry people said she worked 23 hours. I pointed out this was a bad way to enter data and made us look crooked (and had it corrected to be 14 hours the first day and then 9 hours the next), but it really was an honest charge, just entered in, in a way that looked bad.
Which is what this lawyer claims he did here. now, i think this guy failed in his duty to make the approvals look and sound correct. if it took you 3 days to earn 21 hours, bill for three separate days. and if you subcontract, indicate that this is subcontracted time, and so on. but he is absolutely correct to say that billing 23 hours in a day, or even more than 24 hours, is not necessarily wrong. the question is how much we demand that the bill reflect those subtleties.