Believe it or not, lawyers are governed by Rules of Professional Conduct. The preamble to the Rules say a lawyer, as an officer of the court, has a special responsibility for assuring everyone has access to justice. To prevent abuses the Rules vaguely say all fees must be reasonable. Reconciling these rules and deciding what’s a reasonable fee is in a given case is not as easy as it might sound. To show you what I mean I’m going to ask you how much would have charged to represent this single mother and her teenage son in this actual case I once handled.
The teenage son suffered from a medical condition, Crohn’s disease. The chronic inflammation of his bowels caused inevitable accidents involving explosive diarrhea, embarrassment, and social shunning at school. Despite his medical condition he was a really good kid, got good grades, had good attendence, and never got into trouble at school. His mother was so proud of him she wanted to buy him something special for his seventeenth birthday. She scrimped and saved to buy him a car. She searched high and low and found an unbelievable deal on a 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Jet black with tinted windows, chrome wheels, and an amazing sound system. It took every penny she’d scraped together to buy the car but the look on her son’s face when she gave it to him made it all worthwhile. Or so she thought.
What the mother didn’t know was the reason she got such a good deal on the car was because it used to be owned by a drug dealer who sold it on the cheap because it attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention, attention of the law enforcement variety. The poor son was repeatedly pulled over for bogus traffic offenses; failure to use his blinker, driving left of center on an unmarked road, and, my favorite, a blown license tag light. All flimsy pretenses to search for drugs. The boy didn’t do drugs and was let go until one zealot police officer decided to vacuum the floorboards and claimed he found marijuana residue. He arrested her son and, since it was late in the aftertnoon, it was too late for the afternoon bond court and he would have to spend the night in jail. The boy’s mother frantically called me after he was already lodged into the county jail.
I met with his mother that evening and agreed to go to his bond hearing the next morning. We waited with the other mothers and fathers, wives and girlfriends, friends and lawyers waiting for their cases to be called. I tried to talk to the cop, but he was everybit bit a jerk in the courtroom as he was on the side of the road. After listening to my explanation the magistrate set a PR bond. Between meeting with the mother initially, driving to and from the bond hearing court, waiting for the hearing, and the actual five-minute hearing, I spent 3.25 hours representing the mother and her son for his bond hearing.
His next appearance was in the Municipal Court where, to save money,
I told them to appear without me. I knew the mother and son would wait in a courtroom packed with other people just to enter a not guilty plea and request a jury trial on my instructions. The not guilty plea would transfer his case to the pre-trial conference docket where a prosecutor you could actually discuss the case with would be in attendance. When that time came the mother, son, and I waited in another packed courtroom waiting for our case to be called. When it was our turn, I told the prosecutor what had happened and gave him a copy of the title to the car proving it had been recently purchased. The prosecutor bluntly asked the cop how he planned on proving the boy even knew about the residue, never mind possessed it? When the cop didn’t have an answer, the prosecutor told everyone he was dismissing the case. Driving to and from the municipal court, waiting, and the ten-minute conference with the prosecutor took another 2.75 hours. All totaled, I spent a total of six hours on this bogus case that never should have been brought in the first place.
So, my question to you is how much do you think I should have charged the boy’s mother as a reasonable fee? You can think what you want about me and criminal defense lawyers generally, but as I’ve outlined it took six hours of my time to get his case dismissed. Admittedly, a doorknob could have gotten it dismissed eventually, but dismissal is as good a result as any lawyer could have gotten and, if I do say so myself, I wasn’t just any lawyer.
Not fair, you say, I should disclose how much I charged the mother. I will tell you I personally sidestepped the ethical dilemma by charging the mother exactly what she brought with her to our initial meeting. I never had the heart to ask for another penny. I’m not going to say how much that was, but I’d wager it was a good bit more than if you charged your regular hourly rate of pay for six hours. I know it was a lot less than my regular rate. Still, it left a bad taste in my mouth charging anything to this struggling mother who only wanted to give her remarkable son a birthday present for making her so proud. Hopefully my advice, given gratis, to sell the car helped save them similar grief in the future.
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