May 4th, 2015

Lawyers and the Press. Again

GellerLawGroupI hate to pull the stuffings out of this article from the New York Times about women lawyers trying to manage both family life and a solid law practice. It was a lovely, fluffy piece of lifestyle journalism.

The women at the Geller Law Firm, it seems, have based their practice around making sure that they don’t lose sight of the other important things in their life, also known as children.

To do this, they cut back on hours, or make them really flexible, work from home or temporary offices, and focus most of the practice on non-litigation matters such as trusts and wills and small business incorporations. And “[T]he partners limit their litigation business because court appearances and filing deadlines mean less control over their schedules.”

According to the piece:

the founding credo of which is family-friendliness and whose stance on office face time is best described as “militantly against.”

You know what? If they can figure out a way to make the model work, then more power to them. If a group of people, for example, only want to work 30 hours a week, and take home less pay and have fewer clients, no problem.

So long as the clients aren’t affected.

But the article needed a little color. Someone decided it would be nice to have an actual client involved in the cuddly, little piece.

The problem with including a client, of course, is the risk that something will be said about an actual piece of litigation, so you would expect something very benign, such as “I think they are awesome and have no problem with the limited hours and they always get back to me when I call and they are awesome, and I said awesome twice because I really, really think so.” You know, like that.

But that is not what happened, so this is where the stuffings get pulled from the sweet teddy bear of a feature piece.

This part just leaped off the page at me, as confidential communications were exposed in front of the Times reporter:

By 10 a.m. on that Wednesday in March, Ms. [Maria] Simon was seated in front of a client, formerly the president of a condominium association that was now suing him. (The client gave me permission to sit in on the meeting.)

Ms. Simon began to review each count of the civil complaint against him, MacBook open and legal pad at the ready. She had a litigator’s game face that was only occasionally undone by a wry smile she couldn’t quite suppress.

“I have to ask,” Ms. Simon said at one point. “Did you ever falsely represent yourself as an attorney?” The client explained that he had once told a local agency that he was appearing before it as an attorney but that he had meant it “in the British sense,” in that he had power of attorney. “You know you’re not supposed to say that, right?” Ms. Simon deadpanned.

“Yes, lesson learned,” he said.

For the non-lawyer readers, let me explain. What lawyers and clients say between themselves is privileged. But when a third party, unrelated to the law firm, comes into the room, the privilege evaporates. Gone. Up in smoke. At a deposition opposing counsel can ask about every single thing that was said in front of this other person.

Lawyers see this potential problem with some regularity, though not with reporters as the third wheel. Often a friend will accompany the client to the office. And when that happens, it’s the job of the lawyer to exchange pleasantries with these friends and explain to them what a privilege is, and why they can’t come into the conference room, and offer them coffee and a newspaper as they sit in the waiting room.

Why the lawyers at Geller decided it would be wise to have a confidential meeting in front of a reporter is utterly beyond me. And why the lawyer would ask in front of a reporter, “Did you ever falsely represent yourself as an attorney?” is simply bizarre.

Saying that this was not a well thought out interview from the lawyer’s perspective is, I think, a significant understatement.

This is not the first time I’ve written on this subject, where it seems that the desires of the lawyer for press have superseded the best interests of the client.

We saw this just a couple weeks ago with South Carolina attorney David Aylor, who was representing police officer Michael T. Slager, who happened to fire 8 shots toward the back of Walter Scott, killing him. Aylor didn’t just jump ship after seeing the video, but worse, told the world just hours later that he was jumping ship after seeing the video. Because apparently Aylor comes first, not the client.

And we saw this a few years back with Chicago criminal defense attorney Stuart Goldberg, who interviewed with Lindsay Lohan about representing her, and then opened up to People magazine about her “fragile” state. But confidential means confidential.

What should the Geller client expect? That his admissions in front of his lawyer may now be an issue, that everything said in front of the lawyer is no longer confidential, and that the lawyer might actually now be a witness to the admissions, and be unable to handle the matter due to a conflict.

That is one hell of a mess, if you ask me. And I don’t know how anyone can say it benefits the client.

This isn’t to say that all client interactions with the press are bad. But going into them, there must be long and thoughtful discussions about exactly what is fair game to speak about, and what isn’t, and how/why it helps the client.

I reached out yesterday by email to the lawyer involved and she did not yet get back to me.

 

 

April 9th, 2015

Enthralled with the Press

DavidAylorScreenGrabDid someone drop an extra dose of stupid in the drinking water of Charleston, S.C., attorney David Aylor?

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, let me attach it to an incident: On Saturday in North Charleston, police officer Michael T. Slager shot dead a citizen of that city, Walter L. Scott. Slager claimed that he stopped Scott for a broken tail light and then shot and killed Scott when Scott tussled for the officer’s Taser.

Aylor was the criminal defense lawyer for the cop, and said he believed that Slager followed the proper procedure.

But then a video surfaced that showed Slager shooting the unarmed Scott as he was running away. It looks like little more than an execution as he shot eight times at the back of the the fleeing Scott, hitting him five times.

Slager was arrested for murder. And his lawyer — Aylor — dumped him.

But Aylor didn’t just dump him. No, sirree. What he did was dump him publicly, thereby implicitly violating the attorney-client privilege and calling his client a liar. Lawyers don’t do that.

Lawyers don’t get hired for the purpose of violating confidences. If Slager lied to his lawyer in private about the facts, that is between client and lawyer, and nowhere else.

In response to being swamped with press calls after the video came out, Aylor could have said two things. First, he could have said “no comment.” Period. End of story.

Alternatively, if he was sick of being bombarded by press calls, he could conceivably have said that a change in counsel was in progress, and he obviously couldn’t say more. No one would know why. There are plenty of reasons for a change in lawyers, and few would think anything of it.

But instead, Aylor gave an interview to the Daily Beast. And after superficially claiming that he couldn’t discuss the matter, then proceeded to piss on the guy that came to him for legal help:

I can’t specifically state what is the reason why or what isn’t the reason why I’m no longer his lawyer. All I can say is that the same day of the discovery of the video that was disclosed publicly, I withdrew as counsel immediately. Whatever factors people want to take from that and conclusions they want to make, they have the right to do that. But I can’t confirm from an attorney-client standpoint what the reason is.

So there it is, he told the world that

1. He was the one dumping the client; and

2. That he was dumping the client right after seeing the video.

In other words, I think he called his client — to whom he owed a duty as an attorney —  a liar, since the video likely didn’t match the story he was allegedly told. There is no other way I can see this.

And in case anyone might think this was a single, moronic slip of the tongue, he did it again later in the interview:

I think that there’s been a release of information that was not public information at the time, or not discovered at the time at least to any knowledge of mine or anyone else publicly— at least the video. I can’t comment on the specifics of what I think the video says. I’m not going to analyze the video, but again … the video came out and within the hours of the video coming out, I withdrew my representation of the client.

So Aylor intentionally threw his client under the bus.

Now his client may be a murderer, and may be a monster and may be all sorts of mean, nasty things about which you will see protests in the coming days/weeks/months.

But the lawyer’s allegiance is to the client that came to him for help. If clients can’t speak to lawyers about problems then they can’t get the legal assistance they need. We have that lawyer-client confidentiality code for a reason. And it doesn’t get violated just because the lawyer suddenly has a reviled client.

Aylor was completely unprepared for the press. When he should have said nothing, he gave this comically contradictory answer to a simple question:

How did you come across the video?

I can’t say where I saw it first. I first became aware of it via the media. In fact, a reporter sent it to me via e-mail.

Did he think that talking to the press was going to be a neat bit of self-promotion so that the could add another little line to his website about all the press he has been in? Methinks that is going to backfire big time, as I think most lawyers are appalled by what he did, and some of them just must might want to write about this.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about a lawyer disclosing confidentially obtained information in a high profile case. I wrote about this five years ago when one of the lawyers being interviewed by Lindsay Lohan for a criminal defense thought it would be great to get some free press for himself by blabbing to the press about his meeting with her.

Incredibly, there is actually another comic note to all of this. It seems that Aylor put a video on You Tube boasting about being named the top lawyer in Charleston by City Paper (an alternative free weekly).

Don’t ask me how such a stupid survey could be done, but here’s the kicker: Aylor posted that little boast of being best on April Fools Day.

Elsewhere:

The Unwashed Advocate:

..giving an interview to the Daily Beast as an aggravating condition necessitating elevation to Interstellar Capital Dipshittery.

Simple Justice:

What could Aylor possibly have been thinking when the Daily Beast called and said, “talk to us, bro. It’s gonna be sweet!”  The only rational conclusion is that he saw his 15 minutes of fame coming to an end, and wanted to get his brand in there before the name David Aylor disappeared forever.  This was an opportunity to spin his involvement from lawyer for the devil to good guy who wouldn’t be caught dead standing beside the murderous liar.

Noah Feldman @ BloombergView:

[Aylor had] an ethical obligation as a lawyer to defend his client, not to abandon him or harm him by a public act of distancing. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast, Slager’s lawyer did just that, dropping his client like a hot potato and strongly implying that Slager either had been set on a course of perjury or was simply too repulsive to represent.

It’s hard to avoid the implication that Slager hadn’t told his lawyer what really happened, and that lawyer withdrew at least in part because he thought his client had misled him.

Gamso for the Defense:

OK, yeah he essentially rolled on his client.
Yeah, he violated attorney-client privilege in substance if not in form while denying that he was doing that.
Yeah, he made an ass of himself in public, but that’s what comes from media whoring when there’s nothing to back…

Updated 11.11.15: Did Aylor really cut and run? Or was there another reason…

 

July 15th, 2010

Confidential Means Confidential, Even In Lindsay Lohan Case (Stuart Goldberg, Esq. — Fail) – Updated

I really don’t get it sometimes. A client goes to a lawyer with a legal problem. The lawyer declines the case. And then the lawyer yaps to the press?!?  Are you kidding me?

It comes up today in the ongoing train-wreck of actress Lindsay Lohan, who apparently has had a spot of legal trouble with getting boozed up and driving, and the consequences that flowed from it.

But a headline at the ABAJournal on this actress seeking pro bono counsel caught my eye.  Is she claiming poverty that she needs free legal help? No. She just paid two others lawyers already so she thinks her third one should be a freebie. Go figure.

Anyway, this is what caught my attention and rankled me, this bit at the end of the article:

Meanwhile, another counsel candidate who says he refused the representation has already dished to People magazine.

His would-be client is “a fragile lost child” who “just doesn’t get it” concerning the seriousness of the case she is involved in, says Stuart Goldberg, a criminal defense attorney based in Chicago. When he met with the actress and two relatives, “they didn’t seem to understand the urgency and gravity of the situation.”

Why the hell is this Stuart Goldberg, apparently a Chicago criminal defense lawyer, talking about what he heard or saw in the confidence of his practice? And why would any future client ever trust him to keep a secret?

The People article has him giving a great deal of information about his supposed-confidential meeting with Lohan at her home.

More details from the visit at People:

At one point in their meeting, Goldberg, worried that Lohan “was in a dangerous state,” asked if she might hurt herself.

“She started sobbing quietly. She was genuinely in pain,” says Goldberg.

And though he advised Lohan to move out of Los Angeles, which he described as a “toxic environment for her,” the actress didn’t seem open to the idea.

“She was like Teflon to that comment,” he says. “It just slid right off her. She seemed to have some inner deep sadness that that was her fate.”

That is no way for a lawyer to act, unless Lohan agreed to let him yap to the press, which seems rather unlikely.

File this one under Attorney Ethics.

Update, 7/16/10: While I have no desire to follow the follies of stars and starlets on any continuing basis (which is one reason, I suppose, I initially mis-spelled Lohan’s first name as “Lindsey”), I do wish to add another version of why this match was not made to measure.  Goldberg claimed, apparently, that he turned down Lohan, as noted above. But it may be the other way around. According to this report:

Lindsay Lohan says that she turned Goldberg down because she didn’t like his style. TMZ gives the example of his vanity license plates which say “Snake Charmer”.

Snake Charmer. Nice. I wonder if jurors ever see him get into that car.