TheeBadOne
Member
WHY CROOKED LAWYERS GO FREE
http://www.ca-la.org/html/lawyers.html
If your lawyer mishandles your case, charges exorbitant fee or steals your money, what can you do about it? Short of suing for malpractice , you must take your complaint to a grievance committee made up of other lawyers. What are your chances of getting a fair hearing? Accordig to all available statistics, they are so slim that you would be wasting your time. For example:
In Pennsylvania, of the 9,971 complaints filed against lawyers from 1973 through 1978, only one percent-120 cases- resulted in public punishment. The attitude of Pennsylvania grievance authorities is reflected in the form letter all complaints receive. It says that "nearly all lawyers are reputable and sincere" ; that the complaint "may drastically affect the lawyer's ability to earn a living"; that he will "inevitably suffer from the accusation," even if he is innocent; and that complaint "should not expect to be given detailed reasons for the disposition" of their charges.
In New York City, of the 2721 complaints disposed of by the city bar's grievance committee in 1978, only 20 brought public punishment.
In Texas, of the 8550 complaints filed against lawyers from 1975 through 1977, fewer than three percent resulted in any disciplinary action at all, and only one percent –77 cases- resulted in public punishment.
Figures like these are causing a growing demand that the bar's grievance committee system of disciplining itself be abolished and handed over to outside regulators. Lawyers, however, insist this is unnecessary because they are now cleaning up the mess by themselves. Are they?
For the answer, it is first necessary to penetrate the almost total secrecy with which they have surrounded their peer review work. Fortunately, during the 1970's the profession allowed the public to get to peeks behind this screen.
Silverman's bomb. In 1975. A panel headed by Wall Street lawyer Leon Silverman investigated the workings of the grievance committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. This committee, responsible for policing 35,000 New York City lawyers, has often been cited as the country's best peer review groups. But Silverman report landed on it like a bomb. Two of the reports findings:
Almost all complaints came from clients, the committee showed a distinct tendency to take the word of a lawyer over that of a client, even when a lawyer's record contained a long list of previous complaints. The reports cited case after case in which serious complaints- theft of client funds, neglect of client cases, excessive fees, incompetence, bribery- were dismissed without any investigation at all, or with merely a phone call to the accused lawyer to ask him/her whether the complaint was true . One typical case concerned a lawyer charge with falsifying documents, withholding client funds and lying about his fee. The lawyer had a long history of similar complaints which had produced two official warnings and one formal charge of misconduct. Nevertheless, without even investigating the complaint, the committee dismissed it as a "fee dispute".
Secrecy was another problem. In New York (as in almost all states) it is illegal to give out any information about a complaint against a lawyer- even the fact that there is a complaint- unless the lawyer has been found guilty by the court. This meant that almost everything the committee did was kept secret from the press, the public, and the rest of the Bar.
From 1974 to 1975, the committee received 2,428 complaints. Of these , the public learned about only four : Two that produced public suspension and two that produced disbarments. About 2300 complaints were secretly dismissed, and about 100 resulted secret reprimands.
"It is little wonder," concluded the Silverman report, "that some attorneys do not impelled to be responsible to the disciplinary system a system that moves in secret, then winds up disciplining a minuscule percent of those whose conduct is complained about, can be neither effective nor credible."
Paper tiger. Are things any better in the rest of the country? In 1970 the results of a three year nation wide study of lawyer discipline were published by a special panel of the American Bar Association chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark. Here's how the Clark report summed up its findings: "This committee must report the existence of a scandalous situation. With few exception, the prevailing attitude of lawyers toward disciplinary enforcement ranges from apathy to outright hostility."
Nationally, the Clark panel found, the grievance system was impoverished antique, operated by volunteer lawyers in their spare time, usually without adequate help or records, always in secret. Indeed, the panels single out the New York committee- which at least kept records and had a paid staff- for special praise. One witness said in small communities, where lawyers were all on a first name basis, discipline was "virtually impossible".
Another witness called the discipline program a "paper tiger." Case after case was cited of misconduct that either went unpunished or produced a secret slap on the offenders wrist. Lawyers with long strings of complaints against them were repeated let off as "first offenders" simply because the committee had no record of previous complaints. In some jurisdiction, even the rare lawyer who was disbared was allowed more appeals than a man convicted of murder and frequently the final disbarment was issued so quietly that the lawyer could stay in practice merely by moving to another jurisdiction. (The Clark panel found so many disbared lawyers still practicing that it recommended establishment of a "national discipline data bank" to keep track of them.)
Whistling in the dark. Of the 36 reforms recommended by the Clark panel, one in particular put the finger on the real reason for the system's near total failure. It involved this question: Who is in the best position to blow the whistle on crooked lawyers?
"Lawyers and judges", concluded the Clark committee, "are far better equipped then layman to recognize violations of professional standards. However, relatively few complaints are submitted to disciplinary agencies by members of the profession. This fact has been cited as a major problem by nearly every disciplinary agency of the United States"
One witness said lawyers contributed "about one percent" of the complaints his committee received. As for judges, the state chairmen of another committee said he could count "on one hand the complaints his group has received from the bench during an eight year period.
Which brings us to the root of the matter. Almost all complaints against lawyers come from the group that is least likely to report serious offenses: clients. Their complaints most frequently involve fee disputes in minor cases (car accidents, divorces, etc.) that are handled by neighborhood practitioners. And, of course, clients never report lawyers who help them commit perjury, cheat on their income taxes, etc. So, by and large, grievance committees do not hear of important violations of the law by big time lawyers.
Clearly, the profession is not disciplining itself. Lawyers are leaving it to outsiders- nonprofessionals-to select their cases for them; in the process, they are catching only little fish. And they are letting even the small fish off either with no punishment or with a secret and toothless warning not to do it again.
In recent years, a long series of bribery, corruption, cover up and misconduct scandals has spread to distinguished corporate lawyers and law firms all over the United States. None of these scandals came out of the grievance committees (they all originated in Federal agencies, news papers or criminal courts), and only a few of the most outrageous resulted in public discipline. For all these reasons, demands are growing to junk self-regulation as a total failure.
New Ball Game? But the profession insists this is unnecessary. Says John McNulty, a minneapolis lawyer who heads the ABA's Committee on Professional Discipline, "It is a whole new ball game today. There is no comparison between what we have now and what we had when the Clark report came out."
What is the basis of this claim? Some of the more important Clark recommendations have been adopted by a few states. Five states, for instance, have relaxed secrecy requirements. Twenty states now allow laymen to sit on the disciplinary boards. And in at least three quarters of the states, more money is being spent for professional staffs and record keeping.
But most jurisdictions have accomplished little else. For the past 4 years , the most extreme penalty, disbarment, has run a steady rate of only about 175 a year (for the nation's 450,000 lawyers) , and virtually every jurisdiction in the country has ignored what some observers see as the single most important reform suggested by the Clark panel: The imposition of discipline on lawyers and judges who observe misconduct by a lawyer but fail to report it.
For nearly a decade the ABA's official Code of Professional Responsibility has held that lawyers should be subject to discipline if they do not report misconduct by other lawyers. But when asked how many grievance boards had ever enforced the rule, McNulty said he didn't know of any.
How, then, can the grievance machinery be changed? The most obvious answer is to abolish the grievance committee system and bring in outside regulators. But that probably would not solve the problem. Lawyers and judges are the only ones who really know what is happening inside their club, and their cooperation in exposing is essential. How can they be forced to cooperate? A remarkable case now before the New York grievance committee may provide a solution.
A lawyer for a prominent firm was stealing the firm's money, but nobody reported him to the grievance committee. He was subsequently appointed to a high post in the city government. When Mayor Edward Koch learned of the man's crime, he took an unprecedented action. He thrust the city government into the grievance system as a third party, registering a complaint with the committee. The complaint was not against the lawyer himself, but against the senior partner of the firm, for failing to report the matter.
The case shows that, if the peers themselves won't put the finger on the rotten apples in their barrel, outsiders maybe able to force them to do it. And the outsider can be anyone interested in cleaning up the profession, including government agencies, citizens' groups and even individuals.
Of course, the mere injection of outsiders won't do the trick by itself. It's also essential to speed up the professions turtle slow efforts to reform the grievance hearing process. The three most urgently needed reforms are to wipe out unnecessary secrecy, put more layman on the hearing panels and provide the system wit enough money for professional investigating and prosecuting staffs.
There's nothing sacred about the legal professions private system of justice. If lawyers do not try to make it work, there are others who can, and in all probability will.
--------------------
***Much more at the home of the Link***
http://www.ca-la.org/html/lawyers.html
If your lawyer mishandles your case, charges exorbitant fee or steals your money, what can you do about it? Short of suing for malpractice , you must take your complaint to a grievance committee made up of other lawyers. What are your chances of getting a fair hearing? Accordig to all available statistics, they are so slim that you would be wasting your time. For example:
In Pennsylvania, of the 9,971 complaints filed against lawyers from 1973 through 1978, only one percent-120 cases- resulted in public punishment. The attitude of Pennsylvania grievance authorities is reflected in the form letter all complaints receive. It says that "nearly all lawyers are reputable and sincere" ; that the complaint "may drastically affect the lawyer's ability to earn a living"; that he will "inevitably suffer from the accusation," even if he is innocent; and that complaint "should not expect to be given detailed reasons for the disposition" of their charges.
In New York City, of the 2721 complaints disposed of by the city bar's grievance committee in 1978, only 20 brought public punishment.
In Texas, of the 8550 complaints filed against lawyers from 1975 through 1977, fewer than three percent resulted in any disciplinary action at all, and only one percent –77 cases- resulted in public punishment.
Figures like these are causing a growing demand that the bar's grievance committee system of disciplining itself be abolished and handed over to outside regulators. Lawyers, however, insist this is unnecessary because they are now cleaning up the mess by themselves. Are they?
For the answer, it is first necessary to penetrate the almost total secrecy with which they have surrounded their peer review work. Fortunately, during the 1970's the profession allowed the public to get to peeks behind this screen.
Silverman's bomb. In 1975. A panel headed by Wall Street lawyer Leon Silverman investigated the workings of the grievance committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. This committee, responsible for policing 35,000 New York City lawyers, has often been cited as the country's best peer review groups. But Silverman report landed on it like a bomb. Two of the reports findings:
Almost all complaints came from clients, the committee showed a distinct tendency to take the word of a lawyer over that of a client, even when a lawyer's record contained a long list of previous complaints. The reports cited case after case in which serious complaints- theft of client funds, neglect of client cases, excessive fees, incompetence, bribery- were dismissed without any investigation at all, or with merely a phone call to the accused lawyer to ask him/her whether the complaint was true . One typical case concerned a lawyer charge with falsifying documents, withholding client funds and lying about his fee. The lawyer had a long history of similar complaints which had produced two official warnings and one formal charge of misconduct. Nevertheless, without even investigating the complaint, the committee dismissed it as a "fee dispute".
Secrecy was another problem. In New York (as in almost all states) it is illegal to give out any information about a complaint against a lawyer- even the fact that there is a complaint- unless the lawyer has been found guilty by the court. This meant that almost everything the committee did was kept secret from the press, the public, and the rest of the Bar.
From 1974 to 1975, the committee received 2,428 complaints. Of these , the public learned about only four : Two that produced public suspension and two that produced disbarments. About 2300 complaints were secretly dismissed, and about 100 resulted secret reprimands.
"It is little wonder," concluded the Silverman report, "that some attorneys do not impelled to be responsible to the disciplinary system a system that moves in secret, then winds up disciplining a minuscule percent of those whose conduct is complained about, can be neither effective nor credible."
Paper tiger. Are things any better in the rest of the country? In 1970 the results of a three year nation wide study of lawyer discipline were published by a special panel of the American Bar Association chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark. Here's how the Clark report summed up its findings: "This committee must report the existence of a scandalous situation. With few exception, the prevailing attitude of lawyers toward disciplinary enforcement ranges from apathy to outright hostility."
Nationally, the Clark panel found, the grievance system was impoverished antique, operated by volunteer lawyers in their spare time, usually without adequate help or records, always in secret. Indeed, the panels single out the New York committee- which at least kept records and had a paid staff- for special praise. One witness said in small communities, where lawyers were all on a first name basis, discipline was "virtually impossible".
Another witness called the discipline program a "paper tiger." Case after case was cited of misconduct that either went unpunished or produced a secret slap on the offenders wrist. Lawyers with long strings of complaints against them were repeated let off as "first offenders" simply because the committee had no record of previous complaints. In some jurisdiction, even the rare lawyer who was disbared was allowed more appeals than a man convicted of murder and frequently the final disbarment was issued so quietly that the lawyer could stay in practice merely by moving to another jurisdiction. (The Clark panel found so many disbared lawyers still practicing that it recommended establishment of a "national discipline data bank" to keep track of them.)
Whistling in the dark. Of the 36 reforms recommended by the Clark panel, one in particular put the finger on the real reason for the system's near total failure. It involved this question: Who is in the best position to blow the whistle on crooked lawyers?
"Lawyers and judges", concluded the Clark committee, "are far better equipped then layman to recognize violations of professional standards. However, relatively few complaints are submitted to disciplinary agencies by members of the profession. This fact has been cited as a major problem by nearly every disciplinary agency of the United States"
One witness said lawyers contributed "about one percent" of the complaints his committee received. As for judges, the state chairmen of another committee said he could count "on one hand the complaints his group has received from the bench during an eight year period.
Which brings us to the root of the matter. Almost all complaints against lawyers come from the group that is least likely to report serious offenses: clients. Their complaints most frequently involve fee disputes in minor cases (car accidents, divorces, etc.) that are handled by neighborhood practitioners. And, of course, clients never report lawyers who help them commit perjury, cheat on their income taxes, etc. So, by and large, grievance committees do not hear of important violations of the law by big time lawyers.
Clearly, the profession is not disciplining itself. Lawyers are leaving it to outsiders- nonprofessionals-to select their cases for them; in the process, they are catching only little fish. And they are letting even the small fish off either with no punishment or with a secret and toothless warning not to do it again.
In recent years, a long series of bribery, corruption, cover up and misconduct scandals has spread to distinguished corporate lawyers and law firms all over the United States. None of these scandals came out of the grievance committees (they all originated in Federal agencies, news papers or criminal courts), and only a few of the most outrageous resulted in public discipline. For all these reasons, demands are growing to junk self-regulation as a total failure.
New Ball Game? But the profession insists this is unnecessary. Says John McNulty, a minneapolis lawyer who heads the ABA's Committee on Professional Discipline, "It is a whole new ball game today. There is no comparison between what we have now and what we had when the Clark report came out."
What is the basis of this claim? Some of the more important Clark recommendations have been adopted by a few states. Five states, for instance, have relaxed secrecy requirements. Twenty states now allow laymen to sit on the disciplinary boards. And in at least three quarters of the states, more money is being spent for professional staffs and record keeping.
But most jurisdictions have accomplished little else. For the past 4 years , the most extreme penalty, disbarment, has run a steady rate of only about 175 a year (for the nation's 450,000 lawyers) , and virtually every jurisdiction in the country has ignored what some observers see as the single most important reform suggested by the Clark panel: The imposition of discipline on lawyers and judges who observe misconduct by a lawyer but fail to report it.
For nearly a decade the ABA's official Code of Professional Responsibility has held that lawyers should be subject to discipline if they do not report misconduct by other lawyers. But when asked how many grievance boards had ever enforced the rule, McNulty said he didn't know of any.
How, then, can the grievance machinery be changed? The most obvious answer is to abolish the grievance committee system and bring in outside regulators. But that probably would not solve the problem. Lawyers and judges are the only ones who really know what is happening inside their club, and their cooperation in exposing is essential. How can they be forced to cooperate? A remarkable case now before the New York grievance committee may provide a solution.
A lawyer for a prominent firm was stealing the firm's money, but nobody reported him to the grievance committee. He was subsequently appointed to a high post in the city government. When Mayor Edward Koch learned of the man's crime, he took an unprecedented action. He thrust the city government into the grievance system as a third party, registering a complaint with the committee. The complaint was not against the lawyer himself, but against the senior partner of the firm, for failing to report the matter.
The case shows that, if the peers themselves won't put the finger on the rotten apples in their barrel, outsiders maybe able to force them to do it. And the outsider can be anyone interested in cleaning up the profession, including government agencies, citizens' groups and even individuals.
Of course, the mere injection of outsiders won't do the trick by itself. It's also essential to speed up the professions turtle slow efforts to reform the grievance hearing process. The three most urgently needed reforms are to wipe out unnecessary secrecy, put more layman on the hearing panels and provide the system wit enough money for professional investigating and prosecuting staffs.
There's nothing sacred about the legal professions private system of justice. If lawyers do not try to make it work, there are others who can, and in all probability will.
--------------------
***Much more at the home of the Link***
, Art)