Legal Rebels

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1. Posted by cary cohen - 11 months, 4 days, 13 hours, 11 minutes ago

   Why does the general public disrespect the legal Profession? I can provide you with some tangible examples. How about the mjor D.C. firm who refused to provide billing data, or blwe the retainer out of the sky and the sr. attorney for one of the largest firms in the nation, who, upon losing, told his adversary that “he was going to make the rest of his life miserable” and when around saying the the plaintiff was “a liar” to anyone who would listen despite the ruling against his client?

2. Posted by Anglo-Thai Legal - 11 months, 2 days, 15 hours, 32 minutes ago

   These are isolated incidents. There are millions of incidents reported everyday about people in every single profession; who have committed various crimes, misconducts, malpractices or behaved generally unsavoury.

   In answer to your questions:
   (A) it is possible that billing data (like any evidence) could have been disclosed after application to the court or a judicial ruling.
   (B) threats or injurious actions can be restrained and injuncted against; legal actions for defamation and contempt could have been initiated; resulting in damages & punitive costs awarded against a liable party. 

   I took an oath to uphold justice and promote and protect your interests, whatever your particular circumstances. Please tell me what oath (save for allegiance to your nation) did you take and how is it directed in either my favour or society as a whole?

3. Posted by B. McLeod - 11 months, 2 days, 11 hours, 50 minutes ago

   This still does not look much like any kind or real, non-conformist movement.  I doubt that it will have much support, apart from those who view it as a novel hook for marketing.

4. Posted by Bryan Blakeman - 11 months, 2 days, 10 hours, 34 minutes ago

   There is no time like the present for self-examination and reform.  The current economy, affecting all groups and professions, offers an opportunity to realign professionals with the needs of their clients.

5. Posted by Rath - 11 months, 2 days, 9 hours, 12 minutes ago

   Abusive billing is not an isolated incident.  It is so commonplace among BigLaw that it is practically expected.  An invoice with a single line entry for legal services and a six figure tab is hardly what one could call detailed billing information.  Nor is a two lined entry for legal fees and disbursements upon request for a detailed breakout of the same bill.

   Charging substantial add on costs for use of legal databases for which a firm pays a flat rate per month (in contravention to ABA guidelines), charging $300 per hour or more to have junior associates learn to draft legal documents on the client’s dime, charging the client for duplicative work due to inefficient management of attorneys staffed to a matter, charging clients for associates billing time while waiting in offices and conference rooms for partners to show up, and the all too occasional “legal rebel” who double bills time are par for the course with BigLaw.

6. Posted by Ralph - 11 months, 2 days, 8 hours, 59 minutes ago

   How about billing the client for the time used in answering the client’s questions on the billing?

7. Posted by robert - 11 months, 2 days, 8 hours, 51 minutes ago

   I wouldn’t say they’ve exactly “hit the nail on the head.” In fact, they’ve gone quite the other direction.

   The fact is that we DO live in a society that such concepts as “defense of liberty” and “freedom” (however you want to define that) are often left up to lawyers and courts.  So what do these so-called rebels want to do? Foster that, and claim to be the “good guys.”  It’s rather like a used-car salesman calling himself “Honest John,” it really doesn’t mean much. 

   Not exactly my idea of rebellion against the System.

   If they really want to be rebels, fight for simplifying the System so that there is actually less NEED for lawyers. Now, THAT would be a radical idea.

   Imagine lawyers who challenge the actions of the legislatures, when they pass bills that are too long for themselves to bother reading, let alone the unlawyerly people who are expected to comply with the laws. If they didn’t read it, is their vote in favor of it even valid? A rebel would ask this and argue that it isn’t.

   Imagine lawyers who assert that the Constitution is actually a simple document which anyone can read and understand, whether they’ve heard of de Tocqueville or not.

   Imagine lawyers who would say that the Constitution is above everything, including various courts that “interpret” its meaning. I find it rare to encounter a lawyer that has a sense of History predating Marbury, so it would really be a rebel that promotes this concept.

   Imagine lawyers that will inform clients of where to go to handle routine matters like formation of an LLC on their own, rather than paying an attorney a “fair price.” Which is the rebel, “I’ll do your simple LLC for $100 plus costs” or “Why pay me anything? You can do this without me.”

   I’m sure these rebels are nice people, and mean well, but I think their goals are far short of being “meaningful.”

8. Posted by George Chandler - 11 months, 2 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes ago

   As manifestos go that one doesn’t say much.

9. Posted by Blake Anderson - 11 months, 2 days, 5 hours, 45 minutes ago

   I am a professional engineer who spent a career working as a public agency employee and as a consultant.  I have seen professional engineers and attorneys side-by-side for 30 years.  I can tell you this, lawyers are not the only professionals that have a problem with billing clients for re-work, shoddy work, exaggerated hours, and wasted time.  All professionals, be they green just-out-of-school first years or just too comfortable 20-year vets can and do waste time. 

   Time is all we have to apply our skills to the project/brief/trial preparation that becomes our stock in trade.  The trick, and the challenge, is for the firm to develop a culture and expectation of its staff and managers to look carefully at each draft monthly statement and to ask the question: “is this bill a fair price for the PRODUCT received by the client?”.  Wheel-spinning, false starts and crappy work should be picked up by the firm and not charged to the client, in my opinion.  The advantage to everyone is it sharpens our game.  The feedback of a reduced bill is critical for all of the professionals in the firm to see, feel and suffer.  The company gets better at managing itself.  Ignoring fat billing (and lean performance) kills initiative, kills careers and kills firms.  Bear the short term pain of short monthly cash flow for the long-term and sustainable gain of a firm that is high performing, trusted and respected.  You will be blessed with long-term and loyal clients.  Your influence and profits will grow.

10. Posted by Goodsharks.com - 11 months, 2 days, 1 hour, 28 minutes ago

    We wholeheartedly supports the Rebels Project. Goodsharks- Founded by legal rebels, for legal rebels. http://www.Goodsharks.com.

11. Posted by Billow - 11 months, 1 day, 10 hours, 24 minutes ago

    After a quick pass over this issue of the ABA Journal, my assessment:
    The ABA Journal is about as professional as “People” magazine.  This “Rebels Project” thing is a crock marketing device - what 24-year-old journalism major came up with that?  About jobs, and especially BigLaw jobs - there are too many law schools in the U.S., driven only by the need to feed more students into the mill to pay the bills, resulting in too many lawyers in the U.S.  When there is a superabundance of lawyers, ethics suffer.
    I’m sick of reading in the “Journal” of the ends of the bell curve - on the one end the “Legend in their own minds” BigLaw types (and firms)[the Journal must have a lot of Law Review “sniffers” working for them] - and on the other the worst, those indicted and or convicted of spectacular ethical and criminal misconduct.  Most of us are just decent, hardworking lawyers who do necessary but mundane work.  To the Journal - raise your standards for publication - you aren’t “People” or “Inside Edition” - to the law schools - stop it - just stop and go home.  To those in the middle of the bell curve - keep up the good work of providing access to justice in America.

12. Posted by billow - 11 months, 1 day, 10 hours, 18 minutes ago

    And, to Goodsharks - it’s “we…support”, not supports.  The correct use of grammar is a lawyerly skill (but, my guess is that goodsharks is just a marketing tool run by a 24-year-old journalism major who couldn’t get a job working for the ABA Journal or People magazine).  ;-)

13. Posted by Mladen Vukmir - 10 months, 4 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 12 minutes ago

    I agree with the B. McLeod’s post no. 3 above. The underlying change in the societies, that runs in parallel to the current economic crisis is the emergence of understanding on behalf of the clients that law might just not be the best way to settle one’s disputes or even to guide your business. If you use more ethics you will need less law, because as we all know, law is basically (over) codified ethical rules. One could say that law is ethics for dummies. Our profession then built it in an overly complex system that is supposed to provide the answers to all questions. Hardly a good method to move ahead of the others in an ever faster economy. That is in my view why the current woes of profession are not only signs of the crisis of the prevailing legal services business models but also show to the changing role of law. This is also why demand for mediation is rising and why this crisis did not really bring such an increase in litigation. Legal education should acknowledge this to greater extent and the profession should open up to exploring these possibilities in greater depth.

14. Posted by drdebp - 10 months, 4 weeks, 1 day, 13 hours, 25 minutes ago

    I think there’s huge conflict of interest.  Too often attorneys are defending clients they know are breaking the law. What do they do?  Is their duty to uphold the law or protect their client?  My experience is they choose the client, and become both an accomplice and enabler.

15. Posted by Richard Petersen-Klein - 10 months, 4 weeks, 16 hours, 10 minutes ago

    Does the Legal Rebels Project address how the profession oversees the integrity of the judiciary?  While the judicial process is supposed to be public, the public appears to believe that someone else is watching to insure that judges fairly and impartially adjudicate the law.  In fact, it is other judges that are assigned the task of oversight.  Didn’t the United States just determine that when a profession oversees itself, it is less than objective?  My experience indicates that justice and fair play under the rule of law are the exeception, and the rule of law is what some judge decides is what it should be, not what a legislature enacted.  Further, some appellate courts use unpublished decisions to change the rule of law for a particular case without claiming they are changing the rule of law for everyone, like the Kansas Court of Appeals.  Some appellate courts don’t even record their proceedings, like the Kansas Court of Appeals.  Is that a public proceeding?  Some state supreme courts are legislatively supposed to exercise supervisory control over all lower courts, like Kansas.  However, most supreme courts are not required to “take” a case unless they have at least a certain number of justices voting to “take” the case, and if they don’t get the required number of such votes are only required to “deny” the request without explanation.  What mechanism ensures that judges and justices do their job?  How many people really know whether a particular judge or justice should be “re-elected” or “retained”?

16. Posted by Diane - 10 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes ago

    Sorry, but your “Manifesto” is nothing more than a bunch of vague, meaningless platitudes. 

    I believe the first paragraph, and the first sentence of the third paragraph, are probably in substance somewhere to be found in the swearing in ceremonies for most state bars. 

    As for the second paragraph, just about everything - including the wheel - was once a radical innovation. 

    I frankly fail to see how it it possible to practice at all these days without “using technology.” 

    And, as for “remaking the profession,” this would not only seem a bit at odds with your premises (proud member of it, greatest legal system in the world, etc.), it lacks both definition and purpose (what is it about the legal profession that needs “remaking”?).

    And it took you 65 RE-WRITES to come up with this? I’d say that’s about as prime an example of wasted time, duplicated effort and over-billing for little or no results as I’ve ever seen! 

    If you really want to make a difference, why don’t you start by addressing the ethical violations that routinely occur at large and small firms alike, instead of vowing to use the latest software?

17. Posted by john - 10 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 17 hours, 42 minutes ago

    Comment removed by moderator.

18. Posted by Melody Kramer - 10 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 19 hours, 10 minutes ago

    I see a great deal of skepticism in these comments that lawyers can make a change in the way lawyers do business.  Having been a practicing attorney for over 16 years, I can well understand the public’s skepticism.  After all, lawyers have been legitimately despised for centuries (anyone read Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” or Shakespeare lately?)  I used to hate lawyer jokes until I realized that almost all are based on true stories.

    However, for those skeptics out there, keep following developments in the legal profession right now.  Huge changes are afoot in every aspect of the profession.  Ethical lawyers who really want to provide honest, fair-priced legal assistance not only abound, but are finally having a voice in the development of the legal profession.

    Keep watching and you may find yourselves surprised.

19. Posted by Alicia Dearn - 10 months, 5 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes ago

    @12 - Billow, re GoodSharks, your assumption would be wrong.  Your condescension is arrogance.  I appreciate that the comment above had a typo, though this is just a comments section on a website, so you need to get off your high horse.  No lawyer, even one as ostensibly anal as you, ever goes too long without a typo.

    If you care to know, GoodSharks was founded by me, a successful litigator who, after working with two excellent big law firm and then starting my own small firm (and doing quite well at all three, I might add), felt that the law profession needed someone to not just pay lip service to fixing this profession, but actually do something.  Why not me?  Or you?

    I both love and hate being a lawyer.  I wouldn’t be anything else, but oftentimes I feel like this profession is going to be the death of me.  It’s easy for us all to point out the problems of Big Law, but going out and building my own law firm from scratch gave me a wider perspective on the challenges facing lawyers as business people.  Let’s face it; most lawyers are not at Big Law, but problems in the profession are widespread, despite your attempt to minimize it as belonging only to the Big Law / Law School mill.

    Out on my own, I no longer have billable hour pressure (or rather, the pressure is to keep them low to keep my clients happy).  I’ve traded in my 2400 hour years for client relationship issues and business concerns (such as dealing with budgeting, employees, and collections).  Indeed, most of my clients now are small to mid-sized businesses who lack some of the sophistication of my bigger clients—and I am left litigating cases that are not ideal while trying to do so on a shoestring so as to not bankrupt them.  These businesses need my help, though, so much more than the blue chip clients I use to represent.

    The real problem, though, is dealing with other lawyers.  And that was the case no matter where I’ve practiced.  (No, I’m not hard to get along with and I do well with most of my opposing counsel.)  But, there is undoubtedly a virus in this profession of arrogant, overworked, stressed-out, cynical, conniving, borderline unethical, Rambo-tacticians who don’t bother to read the rules or pay much attention to the actual law and facts of a case.  Sharks, if you will.  Bad ones.

    Getting back to my point: if you were interested in actually viewing my web site before you condemned it as some marketing scheme by an industry neophyte, you would see that it is meant to be a community of forward-thinking lawyers who eschew the old order and want to reclaim the dignity of our profession.  It is a community based on honesty, openness, communication and humanity.

    Yes, technology is involved and that is young and sexy.  Yes, the site centers on the legitimate business interests of lawyers, including their legitimate interest in marketing themselves.  But I happen to believe that when you create a marketplace of freely available information (in GoodSharks’ case, about the lawyers themselves), it necessarily leads to efficiency, competition and, ultimately, the best lawyers rising to the top more easily and more quickly.

    I might be swimming upstream, but enough “legal rebels” exist out there that it’s not a hopeless task.  The answer is not to stop graduating lawyers, as you suggest, but to out-compete the bad ones as quickly as possible.  That’s what I’m trying to do with GoodSharks.  What are you doing, besides criticizing?