legal profession

Law firms engaged in debt collection can be regulated by New York City, the New York Court of Appeals has ruled. Christy Young Berger, blogging on Accounts Receivable Management's blog, notes that two law firms, Eric M. Berman and Lacy Katzen, argued New York's law encroached on the state's exclusive authority to regulate the legal profession. The New York Court of Appeals, in answering a question posed to it by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, found that New York's law doesn't encroach on the state's authority to regulate lawyers.

Florida's rule providing protection for the honest errors of attorneys in their judgment about a debatable point of law has shielded a law firm facing a malpractice suit for its choice not to use a particular expert witness in support of hurricane damage claim, Harris Martin reports. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that Florida's judgmental immunity doctrine applied to the law firm's decision.

Law 360's Jeff Sistrunk reports that a condo association sued Childress Duffy for how that firm handled a breach of contract suit against Citizens Property Insurance Co. The condo association was seeking recovery for property damage from Hurricane Frances, including a $1.5 million claim for an elevator.

The defense wind expert called by the law firm was neither a mechanical engineer nor an elevator expert. A jury trial ended in a directed verdict.

 

The Rhode Island Supreme Court has ruled that attorneys can't ghostwrite court filings for pro se litigants unless they sign the documents and disclose how much they assisted with the documents, Nicole Benjamin blogs for JDSupra Business Advisor.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court addressed this issue of first impression regarding three attorneys who ghostwrote pleadings on behalf of pro se defendants in three separate debt collection cases. The case is FIA CARD SERVICES, NA v. Pichette.

Benjamin notes that some legal advocates favor ghostwriting because it's one way to unbundle legal services and provide pro se litigants greater access to the legal system. On the other hand, attorneys who ghostwrite court filings aren't held to account under rules of civil procedure and professional conduct. And pro se litigants, who get greater leniency from courts in how their pleadings are construed, could benefit unfairly, Benjamin writes.

Theresa Amato, writing in an op-ed in The New York Times, questions why the demand of Americans for legal services for life-altering civil matters can't be met by all the lawyers who are unemployed (The U.S. ranks 65th for accessibility of its civil justice, she notes).

The reason that unemployed lawyers can't plunge in right away to address the civil justice gap is because 86 percent of lawyers have six-figure debts, she says. But she offers some solutions: professors who have represented clients should be hired to train practice-ready lawyers. Congress should continue the program that forgives law-school debt for lawyers who work in the nonprofit or government sector for a decade. And more incubator programs should be funded by philanthropists to help young lawyers start "low bono" law offices in which clients are charged low prices for legal services.

Hat tip on this piece to my former law school classmate, Joe Ross, who has started a weekly newsletter of his own roundup of important legal news. Check it out at: http://joeross.me/blog/

The Legal Intelligencer's Ben Seal reports about how the Philadelphia public interest legal community is going through a sea change in leadership. This also is happening nationally as a generational shift occurs at legal services agencies for low-income clients. Cathy Carr, the retiring leader of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, attributes the "increase in national turnover to the aging of the baby-boom generation. Many public interest organizations were founded 40 or 50 years ago, she said, and their leaders are reaching the ends of their careers."

The first non-lawyer legal technicians authorized to provide some legal services in Washington state have passed their qualifying examination, Robert Ambrogi blogs on Law Sites. Seven of nine passed.

The program seeks to help bridge the access-to-justice gap by licensing non-lawyers to provide legal advice in some areas, including domestic relations.

The Association of Corporate Counsel is arguing in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that nonprofit in-house lawyers should not be allowed to blow the whistle to the state attorney general about the misuse of funds, Corporate Counsel's Sue Reisinger reports. The Supreme Court, in a case titled Redacted v. Redacted, is going to decide if in-house counsel may disclose information about wrongly diverted funds to the attorney general's office, "'“as parens patriae for the public to whom the charity and its counsel owe a fiduciary duty.”'

The ACC argues that if clients will be less candid with their lawyers if they are afraid their lawyers will turn them in to law enforcement.
 

Steven J. Harper, has written a column in The American Lawyer challenging Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon's piece in the New York Times in which Solomon argued that the current state of the legal profession is improving. Point by point, Harper says there is not support for Solomon's argument that new law graduates are entering an improved job market. Overall, employment in the legal market "is still tens of thousands of jobs below its 2007 high," Harper notes. He notes that 24 percent of graduates still responding to a job survey were no longer practicing law. He also notes that dysfunctional market keeps law schools alive because they can admit students who can obtain "unlimited federal student loans for which law schools have no accountability with respect to their student employment outcomes."

Less than half of law school graduates who took the July 2014 bar exam in California passed, the Los Angeles Times' Jason Song reports: "The 48.6% pass rate in California is a drop of nearly 7 percentage points from the previous year; nearly 8,500 people took the test in July. The last time the passage rate dipped below half was in 2005." Brian Z. Tamanaha, a critic of legal education and a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said that the decrease in successful bar-exam test-takers could because the number of applicants to law school have decreased and schools are accepting a higher percentage of applicants. Passage rates have fallen in other states too, Song further reports.

James Risen and Laura Poitras report for the New York Times that Mayer Brown, while representing Indonesia in trade talks, might have been spied upon by the National Security Agency and its overseas partner. A February 2013 document "reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information." The Directorate advised that attorney-client privilege could cover some of the information, The Times reports.

The Times also reports that there is only so much protection that the attorney-client privilege affords from NSA surveillance: "The N.S.A.’s protections for attorney-client conversations are narrowly crafted, said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s School of Law. The agency is barred from sharing with prosecutors intercepted attorney-client communications involving someone under indictment in the United States, according to previously disclosed N.S.A. rules. But the agency may still use or share the information for intelligence purposes."

Orin Kerr, writing over at The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy, struck a cautionary note: "It seems to me that  the story here isn’t ‘NSA helped spy on U.S. lawyers.’ Rather, the story here is more like ‘Australian government obtained legal guidance from NSA General Counsel’s Office on what to do when Australian monitoring of a foreign government includes attorney/client communications between the government and its U.S law firm.’"