So far most of the puzzlers that I am getting out of my BusAss (yes, I am immature enough to giggle at that every time) are legal ethics questions. We read a case (977 SW 2d 543) for last week where a partner warns senior partners that the billing looks really screwy for a client. There's a whole lot of smelly subterfuge and then she gets fired for crappy work. Crappy work that the firm had never told her was crappy before. The court held that partnerships are based on trust and you don't have to keep someone on that you don't trust anymore. The dissent was much more in line with the "whoa nelly, aren't we a self-policed group of idiots? and therefore shouldn't we protect her job." But no.
The next case that leaves me confused is Haymond v. Lundy (2002 WL 1972101) where the partners have dissolve the partnership and there is an outstanding referral fee owed to another firm that is in dispute. The long and the short of it is that one of the 3 partners agreed to pay a referral fee (150K) to this other firm upon successful completion of the case. The other partners said that per their p-ship agreement, they had to consent to something like that and they didn't. Fine, all well and good. And the judge said "yup" it's all on the idiot who made the agreement. But the lasting question is: Aren't straight up referral fees a professional no-no? I thought that you couldn't do that kind of thing unless you were compensating the prior firm/atty for their actual work on the case. Maybe my state is different.
Self-policing. Hmmmm.
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