You are looking at the moths gathered around the flame in the room, and concluding they must exist in similar density throughout the room. You are not demonstrating high observational reasoning.
Additionally you are making the gross error of conflating unethical lawyers with lawyers who are incompetent and/or doing their best with a hopeless or unsympathetic case. If you want to continue in that vein, I’m not seeing sufficient understanding to bother discussing this further with you.
In other words, “There’s nothing to see here, move along. Your impressions from watching the news and seeing blatantly unethical behavior from multiple lawyers for a single client is distorted by fictional TV shows and in no way relates to reality”
Not “nothing”. But not much. And not “in no way relates to reality” but “doesn’t much relate to reality”.
Apart from that yes, you got it in one. You need to understand perception bias to know what is going on in the world. If you don’t, you won’t.
OK, I understand. These are not the droids I’m looking for. I will move along.
I hope you understand the irony in invoking “these are not the droids you are looking for” when you are accepting a perception of the world based on what Obi Wan Media-obi tells you.
Yes, I understand. The bad media gave Rudy a script and paid him to stand in front of the Four Seasons Landscaping Company and recite his ludicrous lines. And some idiots even believe that the lines they write for Sydney Powell are real, too! That entire skit I saw of Trump’s defense during his impeachment trial was hilarious! As if real lawyers would ever behave like that!! Funny, funny stuff.
You ain’t gettin’ it and I’m not seeing signs you are going to. Bye
Nice talking to you. I’m mildly surprised to read so open an apology for the legal profession as yours. “You are not seeing what you think you see on television, nor hearing what you think lawyers are saying in public. It is mostly fiction that influences you, and what you think you are seeing and hearing is simply manufactured by a lying media.” Simply wow.
Roy Cohn, possibly the sleaziest human being ever to practice law (although certainly there was plenty of competition in Trump’s orbit) managed to hang on to his law license for all but the last couple of months of his life, despite the fact that everyone knew what Cohn was, and hired him for precisely that reason.
When I did a Google search just now for “sleaziest lawyers”, the first entry to come up was links to three existing law practices in my area. Good to know there are attorneys meeting a pressing need.
Cracked has a list of five all-time sleazy lawyers. Roy Cohn unaccountably is not mentioned. One character solicited sex IOUs from incarcerated female inmates for whom he was supposedly performing legal services (which the article refers to as his “pro-boner” work).
I give you the infamous firm of Morris Eisen, P.C.
The Eisen team had great imaginations. Many of the firm’s cases involved accidents purportedly caused by potholes on New York City streets. One lawyer shrunk a twelve-inch ruler on a photocopier so that it was only about eight inches long. The shortened ruler would be placed by potholes and photographed, so that the potholes looked bigger than they actually were. (Sometimes, firm operatives just used pickaxes to make the potholes bigger.) An Eisen employee was injured at a firm softball game; after the game, the group went to find a suitable pothole at Aqueduct Raceway (deep pocket), where they could pretend the accident took place. The firm once won a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement against the city because of an accident purportedly caused by a pothole on the Queensboro Bridge. A bystander named Arnold Lustig testified that he saw both the pothole and the accident. Six months later, the firm had another case involving a man killed on the Whitestone Expressway, in the Bronx. The eyewitness in that case? Arnold Lustig again! Alas, as my colleagues Jerome Roth and Faith Gay demonstrated, in what proved to be our office’s first Eisen trial, Lustig was actually in prison at the time he claimed to have seen the second accident.
You almost have to admire the thing with the ruler.
One member of that firm went on to be a founding partner of the firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, which employed another nearly Cohn-level sleazebag, Sheldon Silver, longtime Speaker of the Assembly of New York State a huge power broker in state politics. Mr. Silver is now a resident of the Otisville correctional facility in New York, and presumably has been disbarred (are lawyers automatically disbarred upon conviction of a felony? I don’t know).
My point being that New York City, where I live, probably has more lawyers per square foot than any other place in the world. And I’ve worked in IT in law firms for more than twenty years. So my experience (as a non-lawyer) of the legal profession is, on the one hand, probably more extensive than most, but also probably a bit jaundiced.
But all in all, here in NYC, it does seem to be a profession that attracts people with, shall we say, a somewhat elastic notion of ethics. I think it’s likely that the number of lawyers who get caught is just the tip of the iceberg. No, I can’t prove that, but I sure as hell have known a lot of lawyers who did sleazy stuff and never got caught, or sometimes even suspected. [Note to crooked lawyers – the dude who runs your IT systems knows a lot more than you think he does]
I would really like it if posters such as Jackmanii and Saintly Loser would engage with Princester here. This seems the most interesting part of this interesting thread, the part where people are being assured that their own personal experiences are utterly without validity, being told that their lives are some sort of “gross error” and then walking away from the thread in a huff.
Perhaps Princester’s stance betrays the problem in a nutshell? Those who might be able to reconsider the effectiveness of self-regulating (in this instance, of lawyers) are the most in denial of whether the need to do so even exists?
In my experience, as a lawyer, they are very efficient at discipline. As I am a criminal defense lawyer, I represent a lot of incarcerated people who love to write letters and I get, on average, about one disciplinary complaint per year. None have ever been held to have any merit, but yes, they do ask, and you have to provide a ton of documentation even when you are addressing a serial litigator.
The Bar takes those letters seriously enough and hold your feet to the fire. The only one that really pissed me off was when I billed for a state appointed case and billed under my name for my associate, exactly as I was told to do and even put his initials next to the billing, but because we were in trial our hours together exceeded 24 hours in a day and they very nastily opened a case and asked how I could work more than 24 hours in a 24 hour day.
I responded equally nasty based on their prior information as to how to bill and they closed the case but with another nasty letter. It still pisses me off. 
Then how abvout you engage with me, and answer the question I posed to you above? It was a serious question, based on your comments in this thread, and you just blew me off instead of answering it.
I’ll repeat it:
I’ve seen about a zillion fee applications (since timekeeping and billing fall under the IT umbrella in law firms of any size at all).
How detailed time entries are depends on both the lawyer and the client’s tolerance for lack of detail.
Some are insanely detailed. Some have to be, since fee applications must be submitted to a court. Over the years, I’ve seen that fee applications, and therefore time entries, for bankruptcy matters are especially detailed.
I’ve never seen an instance where a lawyer was directed to bill for another lawyer’s time (I’m in no way doubting this happened to you – different places, different courts, different rules).
What I have seen, many, many times, is lawyers billing for more time than they actually worked. Not billing more than 24 hours in a day, but billing a client for an amount of time that, in and of itself, doesn’t seem totally insane (let’s say twelve hours in a week), but billing a number of clients for similar amounts. Anyone with a bird’s-eye view of the firm’s billing could see that the lawyer billed six clients for around twelve hours each in a given week, and might also know that there’s no way that lawyer worked seventy hours that week.
This happens at smaller firms. It rarely, almost never, happens at the mega-firms, where I’ve worked for many years now. What happens there is billing inflation. Associates are under incredible pressure to meet insane billable hour quotas (2,000 and more hours, and that’s the floor, the minimum to just not get fired), and will absolutely take as much time as humanly possible to complete every task. They’re not lying. It’s not fraud. Their bills will stand up to very close scrutiny.
But, from an outsider’s point of view, from the client’s point of view, the line between that and actually billing for work that didn’t happen is a bit blurry.
Here’s another thing that’s just about ubiquitous, and all the lawyers here will say that it’s not an ethical issue, and by the standards of their profession (as defined by lawyers) they’ll be right.
I’ve been told by several lawyers (sorry, I don’t have a cite, but I’ll dig around later) that the most common complaint about lawyers received by the various disciplinary committees of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York is lack of communication from lawyers to clients. In my experience, lack of communication is pretty much the standard, from a client’s point of view. A lawyer takes your case, then pretty much wants you to go away and leave him/her alone (although definitely signing the checks for fees, of course). On the other hand, the client wants regular updates and a bit of hand-holding. To be fair, clients often don’t know just how slowly the wheels of justice turn. But also to be fair, plenty of lawyers regard clients as basically an annoyance.
I’ve experience this both as a client (you can find my pit thread(s) about the lawyers engaged to help with my father’s affairs as his dementia progressed to the point where he couldn’t manage his life anymore) and at law firms, where lawyers put a wall of receptionists and secretaries between themselves and clients.
The complaints to the Appellate Division rarely come to anything, because lawyers absolutely think that clients have ridiculous expectations. And, of course the judges of the Appellate Division are lawyers, who may have had to spend years dealing with clients themselves.
Now, my point is that it is wrong for a lawyer to duck his/her client’s calls. But it’s the norm. And since lawyers set the standards for their profession, it’s accepted.
And it poisons the relationship between lawyer and client, and then maybe clients start to see shady stuff where there really isn’t any.
There’s other stuff that goes on that wouldn’t merit a glance to the disciplinary committee, but is (again, to the outsider) shady as hell. I personally have known a lawyer for many years who’s incredibly successful. He’s a spectacularly rich man. What he does is help a revolving cast of clients, most of whom have been with him for years, set up shady brokerages who trade and pump and dump and all that until the SEC shuts them down. And he advises them how to stay personally untouched, how to distance themselves from the brokerage whose profits they take, and so on. He does nothing that would get him in trouble as a lawyer. But, to my mind, he’s a crook. He knows exactly what his clients are doing, and he’s helping them do it, and getting rich in the process. Legally, he’s fine. Morally, he’s a crook. And he has a whole firm of people working for him (some of whom he makes partners, so they’re just as complicit as he is), and they’re all crooks too. OK, maybe not the first-years, who don’t know what’s going on yet, but most of them.
More to come, maybe, if time permits, including the difference between small firms or solo practioners and the big (2,000+ lawyers) mega-firms, New York City vs. the rest of the country, what makes someone a “Court Street lawyer” (okay, that’s very New York-centric), and all that.
Also, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I can use Latin, we’re dealing with lawyers here. As it happens, lawyers are in charge of regulating lawyers, at least here in New York. Something to think about.
Sorry, I’ve been rambling. If I come back to the thread, I’ll get my thoughts down offline, take my time, and then post.
ETA: I’m not predisposed to dislike and distrust lawyers. Quite the opposite. My father was a lawyer, and later a federal judge. My stepmother was a lawyer. My brother and sister-in-law are lawyers. My wife is a lawyer. All good people. So that’s the environment in which I grew up, and still live.
My work just gives me a bird’s-eye view of the profession here in NYC.
Right. I have a small firm. I have an associate working for me. I am appointed to a serious felony case. When my associate assists me, I asked early on if he should submit his own bill or if I should, since, at the end of the day, he is getting paid a salary by me, so he is not getting the money, I am.
Now, I was told in no uncertain way, that if I am appointed to the case, I bill the associate’s work on my bill and just put his initials in parenthesis next to his work. I did that. But I got an ethics complaint opened against me for doing exactly that. And yes, I was fired up about it.
As well you should have been, sounds like. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been in situations where I’ve gotten in trouble for doing something I was very specifically directed to do. It’s infuriating.
Malicious Compliance. I had my hand slapped for not following an edict. I then followed the edict to the extreme letter causing the governing body some embarrassment. It really felt good.
On Reddit, check out r/malicious compliance
Put that together in a way that shows me a touch of respect, instead of misrepresenting everything I’m saying, and I’ll be more than agreeable to responding respectfully to your post, counselor. Until that time, I remain, yours contemptuously,
Roger That
We’ve had generally positive experiences with attorneys on the few occasions we’ve had to consult them, and I see no reason to think that the vast majority are anything other than decent and competent professionals.
With any professional group, what counts is not so much that there are sleazy and/or criminal outliers, but the ways in which the rest of the group deal with them. Lawyers, cops, physicians etc. could probably all stand improvement in this regard.