FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

The Billable Hour

A small Boston law firm has banned the billable hour and refuses to take clients who want to pay by the hour.  This is discussed in a recent Boston Globe article.  An excerpt is below:

But the Shepherd Law Group is one of the few firms to voluntarily abandon the billable hour system entirely.

Shepherd, a five-lawyer firm that specializes in employment law, charges its clients a flat annual fee or flat price per task. Clients can call the firm as often as they want to discuss legal issues, although some services, such as training and litigation, cost extra. The new approach helps clients determine legal costs in advance and often prevents legal problems from escalating because clients are no longer reluctant to seek advice out of fear of incurring a hefty bill, said Jay Shepherd, the firm's founder.

"Hourly billing is wrong and it's anti-client," Shepherd said. "There's a disincentive to be efficient since you get paid more if you take longer to finish a matter - even though the client wants it to be finished as fast and efficiently as possible."

The American Bar Association concluded in a 2002 report that hourly billing is at the root of much that is wrong with legal practice: brutal hours, lack of collegiality (since time spent chatting with colleagues is time not spent billing), fraudulent billing, lawyers who intentionally stretch the time it should take to finish a matter, unpredictable costs for clients, little time for friends and family, little time for community service, and a system that rewards lawyers for quantity over quality.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

American Legal Ethics Library

Cornell's Law School's Legal Information Institute has created a digital library containing the codes or rules setting standards for the professional conduct of lawyers.  It also includes commentary on the law governing lawyers.  It is organized on a state to state basis.

The narratives and primary material that comprise the core American     Legal Ethics Library have been structured to function as an integrated     collection. All elements of the library can be the subject of a full     text search or entered via a table of contents, but each element is linked     to the rest of the collection in multiple ways permitting a user to track     a specific issue or point from code to commentary in a single jurisdiction     or vice-versa and to follow that same question into materials covering     other jurisdictions. For example, a user interested in Florida's treatment     of conflict of interest can readily find the appropriate code provisions,     follow a link from them to the related portions of the state narrative,     and through the narrative access comparable sections in the ABA Model     Rules or Code or the legal ethics codes of other states.

You can view it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Law Blogs Creating Ethics Problem

There may be as many as 2000 law blogs which discuss topics from bioethics, to legal theory, to environmental law and everything in between, but an ethical problem has arisen as to how much of the content is speech and how much is advertising.  An article in the October 6, 2006 National Law Journal Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues discusses this:

Many states are in the process of revamping their attorney ethics rules, and part of that process involves the prickly issue of whether blogs should be regulated as advertising.

On the one hand, states want to protect consumers from unscrupulous lawyer advertising presented under the guise of an online diary. On the other hand, they want to preserve the free flow of ideas-and valuable legal information presented in a public forum-that the new technology has fostered.

And thanks to Mary McCormick for another source on this, from the November 7, 2006 Chicago Tribune, Lawyers face right to blog; Kentucky

has rules that broadly define advertising to include virtually any communication to the public by a lawyer that contains any information about the lawyer or the lawyer's practice. The rules also require that ads must be submitted for commission approval, along with a $50 filing fee.

Read the whole article:
Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues
Lawyers face right to blog

Posted by Jon Lutz

Warning: Blogs can be hazardous to your career...

Judge Reprimands Temp Prosecutor for Blog Posts

A California attorney with the firm of Keker & Van Nest, while participating in a job swap with the San Francisco DA's office, was reprimanded by the judge overseeing a misdemeanor case he was prosecuting.  The judge found out about comments made in the attorney's personal blog!

"[The judge] didn't find the postings prejudicial enough to throw out the entire case, as the defense wanted. But in turning down that motion to dismiss this week, the judge still came down hard on ex-prosecutor Jay Kuo, calling his conduct "juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional." Karnow also stated his intention to send his written ruling to the State Bar.

The contents of the blog posts were not available online Wednesday, but according to Karnow's ruling, Kuo at various points called his opposing counsel "chicken" when she asked for a continuance, directly alluded to her with some posting titles obscene enough that the judge did not repeat them and mentioned a prior conviction that had not yet been deemed admissible at trial."

It was not only the judge who didn't appreciate the attorney's blog entries.  "Kuo, who declined to comment on the ruling itself, did say he resigned from the temporary position after his posts on the Web site livejournal.com had made their way around the DA's office. "It was just not a comfortable environment to be in any more," he said."

Remember: You never know who is reading your blog out there, so be smart about what you post.

Excerpt taken from http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1146139204085 on Law.com

Posted by Marin Dell

When a Lawyer Becomes Mentally Impaired

  A partner in a law firm has cause to believe that another member of the firm is mentally impaired and may not be able to competently and diligently represent his clients.   In such a scenario, issues such as these may arise:
 -- What obligations does a partner or supervisory lawyer have to an impaired lawyer?
-- Do any disclosures need to be made to an impaired lawyer's clients?
-- Does a lawyer have a duty to report a rule violation by an impaired lawyer?
-- What are a lawyer's obligations when the impaired lawyer is not a member of the lawyer's firm?

Peter H. Geraghty, Director, ABA EthicSearch, addresses these questions in the June 2006 issue of the ABA's Eye on Ethics.  Geraghty notes that two ABA ethics opinons, 03-429 Obligations with Respect to Mentally Impaired Lawyer in the Firm (2003) and 03-431 Lawyer's Duty to Report Rule Violations by Another Lawyer Who may Suffer from Disability or Impairment (2003) address some of the issues implicated in the scenario above.  The article also mentions several state and local bar ethics opinions which have discussed ethical concerns related to impaired lawyers.   

Questions about legal ethics can be addressed to ETHICSearch, a quick and economical way to find anwers to legal ethics questions.  Materials for Research in Legal Ethics are also available.

Posted by Faye Jones

Reading History

Nate Oman, an assistant professor at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary, has written a nice article on why he reads history.

Posted by Toni Urquhart