Lawyers on Trial: Understanding Ethical Misconduct


Product Description
Lawyer misconduct affects many people: clients, adversaries, opposing counsel, judges, the legal profession, and society at large. The records of disciplinary proceedings offer a penetrating, and largely ignored, perspective on how lawyers misbehave. Because the lawyers' professional lives are at stake, the factual records are extraordinarily detailed and the lawyers surprisingly open about their motivations and justifications. In Lawyers on Trial, Richard L. Abel presents the stories of ten California lawyers who broke the rules: hiring an ex-cop to chase ambulances, flouting fee limitations in medical malpractice cases, creating a fictitious company and impersonating non-existent people in order to appropriate Sega's computer games, a former California Real Estate Commissioner defrauding developers and financiers, helping a represented co-defendant negotiate a plea without his lawyer's participation or knowledge, and defying a judge's sealing order and his own client's wishes for closure in order to champion the "defenseless" and "oppressed" and protect "widows and children." The book begins by showing how nearly a century of political struggle over self-regulation shapes the way the disciplinary system selects and processes cases and concludes by canvassing reforms that could improve the performance of the legal profession. Lawyers on Trial will be invaluable for those contemplating law school, law students and teachers of professional responsibility, continuing legal education classes, lawyers encountering ethical dilemmas in their practice or trying to understand misbehaving colleagues, members of the public thinking of retaining a lawyer, and clients dealing with their own lawyers.Lawyers on Trial: Understanding Ethical Misconduct Review
The only thing worth reading in the Abel book is the reply of one lawyer (having credentials and no other disciplinary cases) whose one case was supposedly covered in one chapter. That reply points to the general unreliability of the accounts in the Abel book. Certainly, Abel's supposed "account" of that one lawyer's case is false and, indeed, as the lawyer's reply makes clear, the Abel "account" is a cover up to a bad case of corruption where the disciplinary system was misused for private purposes. Strikingly, the one disciplinary case of the lawyer occurred with respect to a representation in which the lawyer did what the client testified was a "terrific" job where the client originally owed over $216,000 to the IRS and New York State from the client's involvement in a sham tax shelter and as to which the lawyer was paid by the client testified to was what he told the lawyer to do -- keep a refund that was triggered by a tax adjustment schedule negotiated by the lawyer with the IRS. The Disciplinary Committee member who represented the client in state court based on the disciplinary case formally stipulated that the lawyer earned all what the lawyer was paid. Why, then, would Abel do such a hatchet job? Because the source of the disciplinary complaint and corruption was a lie concocted by a fellow ethics law professor. That's not ethics.It may be a politically correct thing among some attorneys in the ethics field to say what a good book this is, the truth is that the Abel book is very poor, very unreliable and hardly readable. It won't teach law students or anyone else anything. There is nothing taught about the application of disciplinary rules, and there is nothing taught about the operation of disciplinary procedures (which are in need of reform). Rather, the accounts are more like a National Enquirer article, only that National Inquirer articles may have some truth in them.
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