Re: unconscionable fees?

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What percentage of cases do you think on average turn out to be nuisance cases
in a typical caseload?

On 9/28/06, Carol wrote:
> On 9/28/06, secretary wrote:
>> Well, it seems like in order to get a large group of people together, where
>> each member in the group is both willing and able to risk $2-4 k on a case
>> analysis, you would have to get a group of people who were mostly smart
>> right? I mean, people who make poor decisions with their money usually
>> don't have a lot of money to spend. Also, foolish people do not tend to be
>> willing to spend what money they do have on "analysis." They do not
> usually
>> appreciate the value of analysis the way smarter people do.
>
> I couldn't disagree more with your assumption. Smart people do not
> necessarily manage their money well, some of the worst money managers I've
> known are doctors and lawyers.
>
> A smart person does not know the law. I see it every day. in fact the
> smarter person (or at least the ones who "think" they're smarter) is
> frequently more difficult to work with because they've "read the
> constitution" or statute or case law or code or whatever and want to tell me
> what the law says and how the case will come out. then they're mad when I
> disagree. One can almost never have all the facts before accepting a case
> that's what discovery is for. you take the case, go through discovery, find
> out it's crap and to salvage something for your cleint you accept a nuisance
> settlement because going to trial is throwing good money after bad. I
> almost always take "ify" cases on a fee basis because there's a lot of money
> that has to spent in prosecuting a case, copies, depositions, etc. and I'm
> not going to eat that. They want to pay to find out if they have a case,
> great. In fact, my state forces people to have an expert opinion in medical
> malpractice cases before even filing the complaint. who pays for that? I'm
> not going to. Having said that, I refuse cases that I believe don't have
> merit, and that is ethical. I know there are attorneys that do this, but i'm
> not one of them. for the rest, I agree wholeheartedly with rrr. below.
>
>
>
>> On 9/26/06, rrr wrote:
>>> Its the Lawyers Ethical duty to give a realistic analysis of the case and
>>> its value. If an attorney were to routinely be intentionally misleading
>>> clients as to the value of the case then yes it would be unethical.
>>>
>>> The practical problem is knowing if the attorney is intentionally
>>> misleading or not.
>>>
>>> The true value of a case cannot really be obtained without a total
>>> analysis of the factors involved. Most clients seldom give you a complete
>>> & accurate synopsis, so its quite possible that the lawyers investigation
>>> and analysis of value exceeds the value of the case.
>>>
>>> Think of it like this: a tax preparer gets paid to prepare a tax return,
>>> whether the tax return results in money owed to the IRS, or a tax refund.
>>> Either way, the time, knowledge and effort required to complete the tax
>>> return properly is the same. The client doesn't get to say... "whoa, Mr.
>>> Tax Preparer, I'm not getting a refund, your fee is unconscionable". The
>>> same is true of most pre-litigation & litigation. In a contingency
>>> matter, the attorney takes risk that after the investigation is done the
>>> value of the case will exceed a certain level. In a non-contingency case,
>>> the client takes the risk.
>>>
>>> An attorney who charges money to do the case analysis is providing a
>>> value. Even if ultimately he tells the client... "your case is crap".
>>> Thats a value provided. For some reason, the general public seems to
>>> think that Attorneys should give that value away for free, though there
>>> is no rational or ethical reason to do so. The fact that the Attorney
>>> then mitigates the clients loss by obtaining a "nuisance settlement" from
>>> the other side is something the client should be happy about, not a
>>> something the Attorney's ethics should be questioned for.
>>>
>>>