But like a marriage, the love and gratitude wanes when money comes into the picture. And that's what happened to Morad Elusta. From Courthouse News:
In a February 2006 complaint against Chicago and several officers, Morad Elusta claimed that police used excessive force while searching his home and falsely arrested him. The city offered to settle Elusta's claims for $100,000, but Elusta refused the offer because he was unwilling to award his attorneys, David Cerda and John De Leon, a 40 percent share.
Eventually, Elusta hired new counsel - Zane Smith and Shelia Genson - who took the case to trial before a jury that awarded him $40,000.
The court later awarded Smith and Genson $83,000 in fees and ruled that Elusta owed his former lawyers, Cerda and De Leon, $15,000 for their services.
A legal fee well earned? An appreciative client? Well, maybe not.
Elusta then moved to have Chicago pay Cerda and De Leon, but give him 60 percent of the amount. He also said Smith and Genson should turn over 60 percent of their fee award to him.Nothing personal. It's just money, and Elusta wants it. As much of it as he can get.
The crux of the argument was that since the contingent fee was a 60/40 split, Elusta figured he was entitled to 60% of everything, whether awarded as damages to him or fees to his lawyers. Notably, Elusta's first attorneys got him an offer on the table for $100,000, to which he turned up his nose. After all, everybody knows that anyone whose constitutional rights are violated by the cops gets RICH!!! After trial, he received a jury verdict of $40,000 in damages. That must have hurt. There's nothing like a good dose of fiscal reality to bring a winning verdict down.
The district court didn't buy Elusta's calculations, and the 7th Circuit affirmed.
"Elusta argues that the phrase 'the attorney's fees' does not clearly cover all of the attorney's fees," Judge Diane Wood wrote for a three-member panel.
In a side note, Wood likened the argument to a quotation from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," where Humpty Dumpty says, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The contract cannot bear Elusta's interpretation," Wood wrote. "What it does, in effect, is to say that counsel is entitled to receive 40 percent of any damages (the contingent fee); if fees are awarded to Elusta pursuant to §1988, the attorneys receive all of that award. The language that the attorneys 'will divide the attorney's fees recovered' unambiguously covers all of the attorney's fees recovered."
So why should the lawyers, who didn't suffer the pain and humiliation of the cops violating their rights by using excessive force in the search of his home and arrest, get more than the plaintiff, the aggrieved? This is where the gratitude of having lawyers there fighting for him turned to mush.
In the absence of a contingency fee, what were the chances that Morad Elusta had the wherewithal to bring the §1988 claim? Slim? None? Less than none? Despite what the internet tells people, lawyers don't work for free. They don't get offices for free, or food for free, or free cars and clothing. Lawyers have to pay for those things just like everyone else, and the way they do is by earning fees from the practice of law. I know, who'da thunk?
I suspect that Elusta realized this. His issue wasn't that lawyers deserve to get paid, but that he wanted more money. His gratitude toward his lawyers for being there, taking on his cause without asking for a dime, waned, like the beauty of a true love. To many plaintiffs, the amount they are awarded is never sufficient to heal the wounds about which they obsess at night as they dream of how they will put those millions to use. Needless to say, defendants tend to obsess over the exaggerated claims.
Given that Elusta blew off the $100,000 offered in settlement, his jury award must have kicked him in the teeth. Not good enough. Who better to blame than the lawyers. After all, it's always the lawyers fault.
Almost every criminal defense lawyer has enjoyed the experience of a client coming to an initial meeting screaming about how he's going to sue the cops for his false arrest and violating his constitutional rights. Almost invariably, this is followed up by a promise to share the millions he's going make from this "easy case" with the lawyer, rather than pay him up front. And they are sad when told that a criminal defense lawyer can't take a contingent fee.
Clients are shocked, SHOCKED!, when they learn that nobody wants to take their "easy case." Clients are even more shocked when, after some lawyer takes on their cause, that they won't be millionaires. At least not because of this. And if that's not bad enough, they feel violated again when they find out that their lawyers get paid for the work they do.
Not every client is as ungrateful and unappreciative as Elusta for the fact that a lawyer represented him in a case that wasn't worth nearly as much as his thought. Not every client begrudges the lawyer a fee earned after the fact, a risk taken when the lawyer took him in and fought for his damages, which could (and often does) produce nothing but a 1000 hour hole in the lawyer's practice. Not every one.
But lawyers work for a living, just like everyone else. And like everyone else, they're entitled to be paid for their efforts. The fact that a client like Elusta wants his piece of the legal fee doesn't change the dynamic. But for the lawyer who expects his client to be happy to see him compensated for his efforts, for taking in a person who would have no chance at redress without the lawyer's willingness to put his own practice on the line, remember Morad Elusta.
It's not that they don't love their lawyer. It's that they love money more. And what they would really love is if the lawyer gave away his services for free. Don't forget it.
H/T FritzMuffKnuckle
© 2012 Simple Justice NY LLC. This feed is for personal, non-commercial & Newstex use only. The use of this feed on any other website is a copyright violation. If this feed is not via RSS reader or Newstex, it infringes the copyright.
Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2012/09/13/free-love-legal-fee-edition.aspx?ref=rss
international law schools internet lawyer labor attorney lafayette attorney law
No comments:
Post a Comment