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Ethics Issues

Sometimes, A Bright Line Rule Just Isn’t Fair

December 9, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

This week’s ABA e-report (12/8/06) includes this article Bright Line Blunder, about a Virginia Court of Appeals decision to dismiss a litigant’s notice of appeal filed by her attorney during a period of time when his license was suspended and he didn’t even know about it. From the article, these are the relevant facts, which [...]

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When You Value Bill, Be Sure To Tell The Client

November 12, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Plenty’s been written about the evils of the billable hour; how the billable system measures time rather than value and in so doing contributes to inefficiencies and bill padding.   But criticism of value billing is harder to come by, and with the exception of David Giacalone’s writings, you don’t find much negative commentary about value [...]

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Huge News for Solos: Wanna Be Bought Out By Skadden? Now you can!

April 30, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Last week, Larry Bodine posted here on a New Jersey ethics ruling that allows a law firm to own another law firm as a wholly-owned subsidiary.  I haven’t had time to read the decision closely or focus on the implications, which I believe are mixed, but here is Larry’s view on what the decision could [...]

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Clients As Pals: Almost As Bad as the Client from Hell

April 25, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Talk to any solo, and invariably, he or she will share a story of a client from hell.  You know who I’m talking about:  the one who won’t pay the bills, who calls at all hours, who wonders why a 20 page motion took 10 hours to draft or who complains about how lawyers are [...]

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GAL Does the Decent Thing

November 30, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

The Greatest American Lawyer has been on the greatest of blog-posting frenzies this past week, with a number of must-read posts.  But the one I’ve selected to focus on is this, which asks Have you ever considered waiving fees even when you did nothing wrong? There, GAL describes his decision to forego several thousand dollars [...]

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Client Expenses – Not Whether They Pay, But How Much

November 28, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

Over at The Practice, Jonathan Stein ponders whether clients should be billed for smaller incidental costs like photocopying or faxing.  Jon falls on the side of rolling these incidentals into overhead rather than reflecting them on a client bill. I agree with Jon.  But for me, the much trickier question when it comes to billing [...]

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Watching out for Clients

November 8, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

Reader Frank Kautz forwarded this great article, Small Firm Life:  Friendly Fire (Raymond Dowd New York Lawyer 11/4/05) which begins with this advice to lawyers:  “Quit worrying about your adversary coming after you; it’s your client you need to worry about.”  Sadly, that’s true.  Though there are some pretty bad lawyers (as we’ve just posted [...]

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When a Client’s Right to Access Counsel Hangs by A Hook…Of A Bra

July 14, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

Donna Thompson-Schneider is a solo criminal defense attorney who hasn’t visited her incarcerated clients.  Lest you think that this is another story about an irresponsible attorney giving her clients ground for an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, read on.  The reason that Donna hasn’t visited her clients is because the prison has a practice of  [...]

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More on Unbundling

July 7, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

In the past, we’ve posted some articles on unbundling of legal services because it offers revenue possibilities to solo and small firm lawyers whose clients may not have the resources to fully fund legal services.  Here’s another article on unbundling, Law Firms Find Revenues in Unbundling, National Law Journal,  July 6, 2005, that reports on [...]

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Why You Can’t Just Take Your Client’s Word for It

June 22, 2005 by Carolyn Elefant

The Supreme Court just issued a ruling in Rompilla v. Beard (see this link at SCOTUS blog for a good summary and links to the opinions) a case that I blogged about several months ago here. In Rompilla, the Supreme Court reversed a death penalty ruling, finding that the Rompilla’s defense attorneys were ineffective because [...]

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