Word: client
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many lawyers also devote time to clients who cannot pay. This is admirable, but not entirely altruistic; they are supposed to do so under the Code of Professional Responsibility. In the late 1960s, idealistic young lawyers persuaded blue chip firms to let them do pro bono publico work, representing indigents on the firms' time at their regular salaries. Moreover, small-town lawyers have long been known to dispense free legal advice or tear up the bill for a strapped client. And school and hospital boards are often populated with lawyers who in addition to getting known around town perform valuable...
...A.B.A. is currently revising the 1969 Code of Professional Responsibility. A vague, well-meaning document, the code provides few clear-cut answers to the problems facing the modern legal profession. A.B.A. President William Spann asks, for example, "Is the lawyer obligated to blow the whistle on a client who ignores his legal advice and violates the law?" The answer is muddy under the current code, but most lawyers generally reply no. A Syracuse attorney retained by a murder suspect concealed from police the victims' grave site and later offered to trade his information to authorities in return for lenient treatment...
...ordinary notions of morality." Under the current code, he notes, only selected and flagrant violations result in a disbarment. Writes Schnapper: "One searches in vain for a lawyer disciplined for failing to give free legal assistance to the indigent, for failing to disclose legal precedent contrary to his client's interests, for misrepresenting facts to judges, juries or opposing counsel, or for using political office or connections to attract clients, although the frequency of these occurrences is common knowledge...
Even with a more clear-cut ethics code, it will be no easy task to root out a number of legal practices that inflate clients' bills, slow down the due administration of justice and provoke public hostility. "Lawyers love to play games," says Dallas Attorney G. William Baab. The games are invariably good for the lawyer, occasionally good for his client and rarely good for society. Among them...
DELAY. Thanks to overcrowded, harried courts, lawyers can often find ways to protract a shaky case indefinitely. Postponements, recesses, objections, motions, depositions, unavailability of client or lawyer?the list of stalling techniques is endless. Sometimes the intent is to squeeze a cash-starved opponent into a disadvantageous settlement. Or it can be even more pernicious. In Chicago, an attorney for a notorious dope dealer won 72 postponements over four years on the ground that he had trials elsewhere. A judge finally tired of that game and ordered the trial to proceed; the jury needed only 30 minutes to return with...