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L2 "discounted" his typical contingent fee for cases that go to trial by half. Still, since L1's fee was not discounted at all, the client's overall fee was unreasonable, and it seems problematic that the lawyers could collaborate like this, collect an excessive fee, and then escape responsibility because the fees weren't "shared" (through perhaps another rule may have been violated). I have left out a number of problems relating to the contingent fee agreement in the interests of brevity, but the "collection" issue I referred to relates to the fact that L2 contends the discount should apply only to compensatory damages and not punitives too.
Fee Sharing or Not?
Client hires Attorney 1 to represent her in a civil fraud case on an hourly fee basis that we will assume is reasonable. There is a valid written fee agreement. As the case nears trial, Client becomes concerned about Attorney 1's lack of trial experience, and enters into a separate, written c...
Not missing anything, but isn't one of the purposes of the fee sharing rule to prevent the client from overpaying? Here, though each fee seems reasonable on its own, taken together, they are not. Yet because neither lawyer is responsible for the other's fee, the client gets taken advantage of. Seems troubling to me.
Fee Sharing or Not?
Client hires Attorney 1 to represent her in a civil fraud case on an hourly fee basis that we will assume is reasonable. There is a valid written fee agreement. As the case nears trial, Client becomes concerned about Attorney 1's lack of trial experience, and enters into a separate, written c...
Aren't there important gender implications here? Isn't there a risk that these positions will become a type of "mommy track" or "pink ghetto," further inhibiting efforts to diversify the highest levels of the profession such as biglaw partnerships, the judiciary, etc.?
It's about time -- law firms offer sustainable careers
I suspect this is not going to be most people's reaction to the article in today's New York Times, about law firms creating a "career associate track." These jobs pay a modest but adequate salary -- say, $65,000 -- in exchange for a reasonable billable hours requirement and no expectation of ev...
I did not mean to suggest that this type of lawyering started in the 1980s and 90s. Rather, my comment was that the writers who Piomelli focuses on did their writing in the 80s and 90s. More specifically, Piomelli has spent a good deal of time exploring the writings of Jerry Lopez, Lucie White, and Anthony Alfieri. Of course there are numerous examples of democratic lawyering, as Piomelli would define it, from the 1960s and 1970s. I'm sure that legal historians could come up with good examples from earlier decades as well.
Piomelli on Democratic Lawyering
Professor Ascanio Piomelli of the UC Hastings College of Law has posted a new paper entitled “The Challenge of Democratic Lawyering” on SSRN. The abstract is as follows: This essay, written for the Fordham Law Review's symposium on The Lawyer's Role in a Contemporary Democracy, argues that a di...
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