Lawyers are coming under fire for numerous alleged derelictions in the Motor City’s abuse-of-executive-power scandal, which involves claims of “false testimony, concealment of information from the city council and possible destruction of evidence. … ‘There’s so much wrongdoing, it’s hard to know where to start,’ says professor John Brennan of Thomas M. Cooley Law School. ‘The city attorneys are not acting like lawyers, they’re acting like (Mayor Kwame) Kilpatrick’s legal bodyguards. They’ve forgotten who their clients are.'” (Martha Neil, “Lawyers in ‘Ethical Minefield’ in $8.4M Detroit Settlement Scandal”, ABA Journal, Mar. 6; Joe Swickard, “Attorneys’ conduct questioned in the Kilpatrick text-message scandal”, Detroit Free Press, Mar. 6).
Posts Tagged ‘ethics’
$46,000 attorney fee request in $44.63 dispute
“Police officer Michael Harrington sued after getting snookered out of $44.63 in overtime pay. He later settled for $10,500 and sought about $46,000 in attorney fees. If that seems out of proportion, Los Angeles’ 2nd District Court of Appeal agrees with you. The court reduced the fee award to $500. ‘At the risk of understatement,’ Justice Miriam Vogel wrote last week, ‘there is no way on Earth this case justified the hours purportedly billed by Harrington’s lawyers.'” (Mike McKee, The Recorder, Mar. 5).
Not Not Guilty Guilty!!
Overlawyered reported last summer on William Ross’s findings about the double billing of clients, and Ted opined on it at Point of Law.
Cameron Stracher’s book (his second) entitled Double Billing: A Young Lawyer’s Tale Of Greed, Sex, Lies, And The Pursuit Of A Swivel Chair is careful not to assert that there was double billing going on in his fictional New York white shoe law firm, but there was certainly plenty of churning, redundant/unnecessary work, etc., the ethics of which is comparably impugned by the principles behind the rule against double billing.
In light of Judge Matsch’s repudiation of Big City trial counsel’s conduct in the Medtronic Case, I got to thinking about unethical lawyer conduct, and asked myself this:
Aside from the obvious business remedy available to the client, does trial counsels’ misconduct excuse the client from paying their bill (or enable them to recover the fees paid)? Does the answer to that depend on whether the client was complicit in the unethical strategy?
Don’t IX
Another bunch of things not to do if you’re a member of the legal profession.
- Don’t get caught pursuing forged fen-phen claims. (Robert Arledge, Vicksburg, Mississippi, sentenced to 6.5 years, the only lawyer to date to be sentenced in a much larger fen-phen scandal.) [ABA Journal]
- Don’t try to dissuade a witness from testifying at a deposition. (Cleary Gottlieb, which said it would appeal the judge’s order of sanctions.) [WSJ Law Blog]
- Don’t inflate your GPA and include fake awards on your resume. (Gregory Haun, DC, recommended for suspension, resigned his six-digit BigLaw associate job.) [Legal Times]
- Don’t end your jury service by casting a vote to break a deadlock and then sign a statement drafted by the plaintiffs’ attorney asking for a new trial saying that you did so so you can return to work. (California bar has recommended disbarment for Francis Fahy.) [ABA Journal; Recorder ($); Law.com ($)]
- Don’t steal money from your clients by forging their signatures on insurance company releases to get their settlement money. (Richard Boder, New York, caught as part of a larger scandal involving the illegal use of paid runners to bribe hospital employees about auto accident injuries, sentenced to a year in prison.) [NY Law Journal]
- Don’t read Maxim in the courtroom. (Todd Paris, held in contempt by North Carolina judge.) [WSJ Law Blog]
- Don’t have an affair with a judge you’re practicing in front of, or vice versa. (Federal Way, WA, Municipal Court judge Colleen Hartl resigned after bragging about an affair with public defender Sean Cecil, who still has 5 Avvo stars for professional conduct, but has been the subject of a formal complaint to the bar.) [AP/Post-Intelligencer; Federal Way News; Lat]
(Earlier: Nov. 5, etc.)
Long Island school-district attorneys
Looks like some have found ways to game the state’s employment rules:
Five Long Island school districts falsely reported to the state that a part-time private attorney was a full-time employee in each district, enabling him to earn a public pension of nearly $62,000 and health benefits for life.
At the same time, the districts paid his law firm more than $2.5 million in fees, records show.
The attorney, Lawrence W. Reich, was listed as full time by five different school districts at once – Baldwin, Copiague, East Meadow, Bellmore-Merrick High School and Harborfields, according to records supplied by the New York State comptroller’s office. In 2000, for example, he was credited with working 1,271 days in one year. The year before, he was credited with working 1,286 days….
Under Internal Revenue Service rules, a person cannot be paid both as an independent contractor and employee for the same job.
“Clearly, it’s an attempt to manipulate the system so that a person can receive Cadillac fringe benefits that a person in the private sector would otherwise not be entitled to,” said Paul Sabatino, a municipal lawyer who is also former Suffolk chief deputy county executive. …
“I followed essentially a practice that was very common among my colleagues in the industry,” [Reich] said.
(Sandra Peddie, “Five districts falsely reported lawyer job status”, Newsday, Feb. 15).
Lerach: “Everybody was paying plaintiffs”
“A prominent class-action lawyer facing sentencing today for secretly paying plaintiffs to file securities lawsuits, William Lerach, is suggesting that the under-the-table practice was widespread and was not isolated to the firm he helped run for decades, Milberg Weiss. … Despite the highly publicized travails of what was once America’s leading class-action law firm, there has been little public discussion of whether other firms may have emulated the secret payment scheme Lerach and other Milberg lawyers devised.” Notwithstanding a request by Lerach’s lawyers that the letters from his friends and supporters asking clemency be sealed from public inspection, most of the letters have become public, revealing the identities of such entirely unsurprising Lerach backers as Ralph Nader (who in this one particular case did not favor prison for white-collar criminality) and Ben Stein, known to readers of these pages (though apparently not to many readers of his New York Times column) as an expert witness hired repeatedly by Lerach to help portray sued companies’ conduct in the harshest possible light. (Josh Gerstein, “Lerach Says Payoffs Were Widespread”, New York Sun, Feb. 11). Another letter writer: Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) And the list of letter-writers (PDF) includes “two redacted names in between Gordon Churchill and Charles Cohen”, leading to speculation that one or both surnames might be “Clinton”. It seems unlikely, though, that either prominent ex-White House resident would have risked the sort of negative publicity involved even as a gesture to acknowledge Lerach’s past favors. (CalLaw “Legal Pad”, Feb. 8)(corrected shortly after posting to reflect release of most letters by stipulation of parties, not judicial order). Update 4 p.m. EST: sentence is 24 months.
Update: 5th Circuit overturns Louisiana fuel-gauge fee division
Last week the “5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voided a 2007 lower court order parceling out $6.8 million in fees to plaintiffs attorneys in a lawsuit over tainted Shell gasoline.” The case had come under intense criticism, as we noted last year, “after the lawyers in charge prevailed on a federal judge to conceal the allocation of fees from public scrutiny, including scrutiny by members of the client class as well as dissident lawyers”. The ruling marks a victory for Loyola lawprof Dane Ciolino, who assisted objectors and helped rally public attention to the problems with the settlement. (Susan Finch, “Decision allocating legal fees tossed”, Nola.com (New Orleans Times-Picayune), Feb. 8).
“Ex-Milberg Weiss honcho to head NYC Bar”
Patricia Hynes, who spent 24 years at now-disgraced Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach and more than ten on its executive committee, is now slated to become the next president of the New York City bar association. The favorable assumption is that Hynes, a former prosecutor who became a name partner in the firm, was systematically duped by her former colleagues, as Roger Parloff at Fortune notes:
While being a dupe is not unethical, and certainly not illegal, it’s no badge of honor, either. For idealistic young law students making their career choices, it must have been reassuring if not inspirational to see former Manhattan executive assistant U.S. attorney Pat Hynes’s name so prominently displayed on Milberg’s letterhead. It vouched for the integrity of the whole operation. Whether she knew it or not, part of what she was being paid to do there for 24 years was to lend the firm an aura of integrity that, judging from three top partners’ guilty pleas, it didn’t deserve.
Before assuming the high professional honor of a bar presidency, Parloff wonders, shouldn’t Hynes be more willing to answer questions about her time at Milberg? (cross-posted from Point of Law).
Judge: “Monumental” discovery violations fit for bar discipline
“On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Major sanctioned five attorneys from Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder and one from Heller Ehrman for their roles in ‘monumental’ discovery violations in a patent infringement case between Qualcomm Inc. and Broadcom Corp. She also sanctioned Qualcomm for intentionally withholding ‘tens of thousands of e-mails’ that it should’ve turned over during the litigation. … Major wrote that the attorneys may have violated California Rules of Professional Conduct that prohibit lawyers from suppressing evidence (5-220) and misleading a judge or a jury by false statements (5-200).” (Zusha Elinson, “Will Harsh Ruling Over Qualcomm Discovery Increase Chances of Bar Discipline?”, The Recorder, Jan. 9; “Six Lawyers in Qualcomm Case Sanctioned for ‘Monumental’ Discovery Violations”, Jan. 8; WSJ law blog)