By Joseph Schuman

Fired lawyer claimed he was told to bill 3,000 hours a year

12/12/11

If you think 3,000 billable hours a year seems a lot to ask of just one attorney, California lawyer Richard Unitan would agree with you.

Unitan is now suing the firm he accuses of demanding such an unrealistic workload and firing him when he couldn't do it.

The ABA Journal, in sharing the story with us, notes the 3,000-hour mandate would require a lawyer to work more than eight hours a day every day for a year, and that most firms don't ask for more than 2,100 annual billable hours. But according to Unitan, that was what Los Angles-based worker-compensation firm Adelson, Testan, Brundo & Jimenez wanted. Unitan says he was told to bill for "thinking time" and to charge clients for every six-minute increment he spent on a task, no matter how quickly it went. "For example, if a lawyer receives and reads an e-mail, he or she may bill .1 hours; and if that same lawyer then responds to the e-mail, that may be another .1 hours," Unitan says in the suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Still, to meet the quota, he adds, he would have needed to commit billing fraud.

The firm denies it. In an interview with the subscription-only Los Angeles Daily Journal, Adelson Testan's Darrin Meyer says he was "truly shocked" when he heard Unitan's claims. "It is completely false, and it is, I think, a desperate fabrication," Meyer says.

"Nobody here commits billing fraud. The allegations are completely untrue."

ICC wants U.N. to deal with country that ignored arrest warrant

12/12/11

The International Criminal Court is apparently tired of countries ignoring its international arrest warrant for Omar Al Bashir, the Sudanese leader who has been jetting around Africa despite his indictment for war crimes and genocide. Now, the ICC is asking the United Nations Security Council to lean on scofflaws, starting with Malawi.

The small southeast African nation played host to Al Bashir in October, and the ICC later called for an explanation. Last month Malawian officials sent a note saying the country wouldn't consider turning over an indicted head of state because it is following a "position adopted by the African Union": that such indictments are trumped by the typical immunity granted to visiting presidents and prime ministers. This argument didn't sit well with the judges at the ICC.

First of all, they noted, Malawi didn't provide any documents spelling out the African Union's position. And as it turns out, there' actually no official AU policy on the matter. Moreover, the judges say they have already ruled that ICC jurisdiction isn't limited by international laws that otherwise grant immunity to heads of state. They point to previous war-crime tribunals' indictments of Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor, as well as the ICC indictments of Moammar Gadhaffi and Laurent Gbagbo - the former Ivorian leader currently sitting in an ICC cell at the Hague. "The Judges noted that immunity for heads of state before international courts has been rejected time and time again dating all the way back to World War I," the ICC explained.

But the ICC didn't offer what seems to be an important element of the story and an area of international law government as much by politics as anything else: what the judges expect the Security Council to do with the Malawi referral.

Former congressman says bribery convictions inappropriately covered nonofficial acts

12/12/11

Ex-Congressman William Jefferson doesn't deny committing the acts that led to his conviction on corruption charges. He just doesn't think those acts should be considered official congressional actions. And that, he is arguing on appeal, should make the difference between a crime and, well, a legislator's side-business.

Jefferson, a Democrat, had represented his New Orleans district for 15 years when federal agents raided his offices in 2006 looking for evidence that he helped businesses get contracts with foreign governments, as Roll Call recounts. He was subsequently indicted on 16 corruption charges and was put on trial in 2009. Prosecutors said that during official trips to Cameroon, Nigeria and other countries, Jefferson contacted foreign officials on behalf of American businesses, which then sent cash or stock to companies controlled by the congressman. The jury agreed, convicting Jefferson on 11 charges, and he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

But on Friday, Jefferson's lawyers argued to a panel of the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that he met with the foreign government representatives on his own time, and that he therefore shouldn't have been tried on bribery charges that cover "official acts." Since the meetings weren't related to his formal legislative duties, he shouldn't have been charged in the first place, his lawyers said. That argument over what counts as an official act is, as legal experts tell Roll Call, a somewhat "novel" legal theory.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lytle responded by saying that if Jefferson's conviction is reversed, current bribery laws wouldn't cover many fraudulent acts that lawmakers can commit. "Congressman Jefferson asks this court to do something that no other court has done before. He asks this Court to find that a significant part of the job of a Member of Congress should be excluded from the reach of the federal bribery statute," Lytle said. The judges of the Fourth Circuit, who expressed some skepticism of Jefferson's arguments, are expected to issue a ruling in the case in about two months.

A bigger role for housing agency's top cop

12/12/11

There's a new sheriff in town, and his name is Steve Linick. Oh yeah, and he's a housing regulator.

It is a telling detail of this post-housing-meltdown era that the inspector general of the Federal Housing Financing Agency has the power to issue subpoenas and commands officers who carry badges and guns, as we learn from the Wall Street Journal's description of Linick. The former assistant U.S. attorney and senior Justice Department official was appointed to the new role by President George W. Bush and reappointed by President Barack Obama. But he was only confirmed by the Senate in late 2010 and took charge of policing parts of federal housing this year. Since then, Linick has expanded his jurisdiction -- to the chagrin, perhaps, of his FHFA superiors -- beyond the agency to the entities it oversees: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the $5 trillion in mortgages they guarantee.

To that end, Linick also plans to expand his staff of 100 people with an additional 50 next year - to police an agency that is only 520-people strong. That compares with just 26 people working for the inspector general overseeing the 3,900 employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission. And it looks like some or many of those new employees could be tackling the kind of white-collar crimes and fraud that were Linick's bread-and-butter work at the DOJ. He recently sent federal agents to search the homes of Fannie employees as part of an inquiry into defaulted commercial mortgages, one of 48 investigations he now has under way. Another subject he's examining is how Fannie and Freddie negotiated legal settlements. Today we could learn more about those probes and his future legal plans when Linick briefs Congress on what he has found.

Poll finds little respect for lawyers' honesty and ethics

12/12/11

Maybe your mother was right: You shoulda been a doctor.

While Americans consider doctors and nurses among the most honest and ethical professions, lawyers get little respect, according to Gallup's annual honesty and ethics survey. Only 19 percent of Americans rated lawyers' ethics and honesty as high or very high, while 37 percent rated them low or very low, according to the telephone poll of more than 1,000 adults. That put lawyers well above the ethics ratings given to members of Congress -- who fell to a historic low as well as lobbyists, car salespeople and telemarketers. But attorneys were considered less honest than bankers and real estate agents, and only on ranking better than business executives.

Still, that 19 percent positive rating for lawyers was the highest it has been in at least 15 years, to judge by Gallup's historical data.

Last year only 17 percent has a positive view of lawyerly honesty, and in 2009 such respect for lawyers fell to a historic low of 13 percent.

But don't expect the general view of lawyers to improve. A separate Gallup survey taken in August indicated only 29 percent of Americans have a positive view of the legal field. And that number hasn't changed in the decade that Gallup has been conducting the survey.

Appellate court reverses conviction by prosecutors who belittled DNA

12/12/11

Last week, we told you about Michael Mermel, the Illinois prosecutor who was forced to retire after offending his bosses with remarks that denigrated DNA evidence in the New York Times. Late Friday, an Illinois appellate court reversed a murder and rape conviction secured by Mermel's office and slammed prosecutors for how they had tried the case.

Mermel, the Times now reports, was the lead prosecutor in the most recent trial of Juan Rivera for the 1992 death of an 11-year-old girl in a Chicago suburb. The most damning evidence was a confession Rivera gave to police after four days of questioning. That confession, prosecutors said, included facts only the murderer would know. Yet there was no physical evidence tying him to the murder, and a DNA test in 2005 found that sperm in the dead girl's body wasn't from Rivera. The Lake County prosecutors tried to explain that away by saying the sperm sample could have been contaminated, or the girl might have been sexually active.

Now, 19 years after Rivera first went to prison, the appellate court said no rational jury should have bought those arguments. Police, the court said, essentially used leading questions and "psychological suggestion" to feed him the incriminating facts during the interrogation, making the confession dubious. And while the DNA evidence doesn't necessarily exonerate Rivera, it "embedded reasonable doubt deep into the state's theory," the court said. Prosecutors' theories "distort to an absurd degree the real and undisputed testimony that the sperm was deposited shortly before the victim died," the appellate judges added. "The most reasonable explanation, therefore, of who murdered the victim is not the defendant but rather someone who, unfortunately, has not yet been identified." And Rivera, they said, "has suffered the nightmare of wrongful incarceration."

Summary Judgments for Dec. 9

Summary Judgments for Dec. 8

Summary Judgments for Dec. 7

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