I have pretty strong feelings against lawyers, and after reading the article by Limpak it only served to fuel my fire. It is unfortunate, but doesn’t come as a surprise, that lawyers would take advantage of their client to help give themselves a leg up on other lawyers. “The Ethical Considerations are aspiration in character and represent the objectives toward which every member of the profession should strive. They constitute a body of principles upon which the lawyer can rely for guidance in many specific situations.” (http://www.law.cornell.edu/ethics) Using a client as a pawn in not in the best interest of the client and undermines the lawyers code of ethics.
In response to this heated topic of lawyers using their clients to achieve personal notoriety, Abeles wrote an article called Quite Desperation for his blog. “The upshot is not that clients should decline to add top Supreme Court practitioners when presented with the opportunity to put one to a case. Rather, it's that clients must do the homework. Think twice.” (http://quietdesperationblawg.blogspot.com/2010/10/supreme-court-practices-turks-clerks.html) Translated, Abeles is saying that the client seeking representation should try to evaluate if their “high priced lawyer who’s working for free” has any personal stakes behind the pro-bono work.
Usually these types of cases that lawyers are going after, represent a poor client. These clients typically don’t have much education and definitely can’t afford to hire a good lawyer. When you put these together, it’s a recipe for disaster. To use a metaphor, it is like partnerin an injured deer with a mountain lion; the deer is simply being slaughtered and has no power against the lion.
The solution might perhaps be to limit how a lawyer can collect his fee when representing a poor client’s high profile case to the Supreme Court. If a lawyer is limited on how much they can retain from a settlement, the questions begs, would an attorney ever take a chance to represent a client where after it’s all said and done the lawyers might not be compensated appropriately? “The decision leaves public interest advocates worried that it will become more difficult to find attorneys willing to take on important—but often far less lucrative—cases.” (http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/rights/info-04-2010/supreme_court_fee_bonuses.html) This is definitely a difficult question to answer, and does nothing but give lawyers a bad name. But then again, what’s new with that?
Works Cited:
Supreme Court Clarifies Fee Bonuses for Underdogs’ Lawyers. Yeager. 2010.
American Legal Ethics Library. http://www.law.cornell.edu/ethics/
Supreme Court Practice's Turks, Clerks, and Quirks. Blog: Scott Abeles. October 19, 2010.
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