TO-WIT: LAWYER FOR AN EPOCH
Like many contemporary and responsible bar associations, our county bar runs a pro bono program. We call it “Lawyer for a Day,” and like many contemporary and responsible members of our local bar, I am coerced into participation. Oh now, don’t get me wrong, I actually don’t mind. Not only does it afford me the chance to do something worthwhile, it also offers me an excellent opportunity to appreciate that there are just as many clients outside my practice who have no intention of paying me either.
“Lawyer for a Day” is a catchy enough phrase, but not an accurate one. In fact, there has probably not been a less apt euphemism since the Serpent sidled up to Adam as he exited the Garden and said “Oooh, bummer.” It is never for a day, it frequently isn’t even for a month. In fact, we’re lucky if we can wind up some of these cases before we take retirement.
It isn’t that the legal issues presented by pro bono cases are novel or complex. I mean, they rarely involve filing suit over warranty repairs for their Hummers. To the contrary, they’re usually simple enough matters, landlord-tenant, unemployment compensation, adoptions, drafting wills for estates that are already insolvent, you know, the kinds of things we can and frequently do do in our sleep.
So why then do they seemingly last forever and sometimes even longer? Well, usually a client’s decisions involving litigation are made, in no small part, based on the legal fees likely to be incurred as a result of the actions contemplated. Cost is a wonderful deterrent to protracted litigation, for it remains an eternal truth that clients spare no expense in such maters only when there are no expenses to spare.
However, in pro bono matters, this is not the case. Without legal fees to factor into the equation, litigation decisions are made primarily on the basis of principal, right and wrong, you know, those admirable yet ethereal qualities that are the lawyer’s equivalent of the plague and can easily propel the smallest of cases far into the next millennium.
As Lawyer for a Day, I recently (in pro bono terms), that means about two years ago) undertook to represent a client who was quite sick, probably terminal, with cancer. His only income was Social Security and his dilapidated house was about to be sold by the municipality to satisfy the default judgment it took for his failure to pay the annual seventy-dollar garbage bill. The municipality had engaged the services of a slick, Big City Law Firm that had run up counsel fees and costs in excess of two thousand dollars just to process the paperwork. Then they passed the fees and costs onto the client as permitted by the municipal lien statute.
Avoiding the obvious question (“Why the hell did you wait so long?”), I told my client not to worry, that no one would sell his house to pay a seventy-dollar bill. But when I phoned opposing counsel and recited my client’s tale of woe, he told me that not only were they going to sell his house, they were also going to add one hundred dollars to the amount owed for the time it took to answer my phone call. I guess I should have expected such a response, for when I told him my client was destitute and dying of cancer, he said “Oooh, bummer.”
After extensive conversations with opposing counsel, it became obvious that an amicable resolution was not in the cards. In desperation I finally looked at the law. There I found a procedure for challenging the reasonableness of counsel fees, and one petition and quite some time later I found myself, with client in tow, in the midst of what turned out to be a five hour hearing.
In the course of the hearing, it came out that opposing counsel had 6000 similar cases from various municipalities throughout the state, that the township had no obligation to reimburse its counsel for the costs and fees incurred, and that recovery was entirely contingent upon opposing counsel collecting all fees and expenses from his victim. Under such an arrangement with the clients, I guess its pretty easy to understand how opposing counsel had built such an enormous garbage practice.
Neither my client nor the opposing party faced the obligation of fees and expenses. I was in it for the principal, opposing counsel for the capital. Damned if we weren’t headed for the Supreme Court.
Apparently opposing counsel did not want to run the risk of a reported opinion in which he could no longer take refuse, for at the conclusion of the hearing, he offered to settle the entire claim for four hundred dollars in unreimbursed expenses. From my perspective not a bade deal, considering it was a two thousand dollar judgment. From my client’s perspective however, it might as well have been a million.
“I suppose I could stop buying my cancer medicine for a couple of months to pay it off,” he said, and that cinched it. I knew what I had to do. I sent opposing counsel a personal check for the four hundred bucks.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that paying off a client’s debt cannot be a good thing for my practice. Well, I beg to differ. First off, the client was so grateful when I told him, tears came to his eyes. For me to attain that state of grace would have been cheap at many times the price. In addition, while my decision might not strictly have been pro bono publico, it sure as hell was pro bono attornio. His case is over and I freed up untold billable hours for the next century. And finally, as far as my practice goes, if word ever gets out about this I’ll have all the new clients I can handle. Now that’s something I can take, if nothing else, to the bank.
© 1999, S. Sponte, Esq.