There’s an old saw that hard cases make bad law. The Second Circuit has just proven that sometimes easy cases make bad law. A hot shot law firm from New York City asked for an exorbitant fee in a Voting Rights case, and the court properly reduced the fee. It then went on to rather gratuitously state that in determining a proper award of attorneys fees, other considerations than time reasonably spent to win the case might be considered
It ruled that there are cases in which lawyers may be paid not in dollars but in what it called “non-monetary returns.†Those include, the court said, “experience, reputation or achievement of the attorneys’ own interests and agendas.â€
In other words, if you get a warm and fuzzy feeling out of handling a case, that’s reward enough, or at least part reward enough, so why get filthy lucre too? This may seem like a novel way of looking at the issue, but it’s not really that original. I remember when I was working at legal services there was an attitude among some of our funders that we should be content with low salaries because we had the advantage of doing good. The flip side, I guess, is that people who represent the scum (particularly corporate scum) of the earth deserve the big bucks because of the psychic pain all that harm they’re doing is causing them. Maybe, when those folks seek fee awards, they should get extra.
For the most part, the cases we’re talking about involve matters in which the lawyer doesn’t get paid at all if he or she loses. Since a person who has a practice like that is likely to lose a fair number of their cases their real hourly rate has to take into account all the hours for which they don’t get paid.
It’s getting harder and harder for small firms and public interest firms to attract good talent, in large part because law school graduates have crushing debt that they have to retire after they graduate. This kind of thinking just makes it harder for the public interest firms to compete. The last time I looked, you can’t repay loans with warm feelings.
2 Comments