Law Practice Management and Technology
The Bottom Line Volume 35, No. 3 June 2014
Content
- Coach's Corner: Billing Conundrums and How to Solve Them
- Creative Lawyer Is Not an Oxymoron or Why Johnny Esq. Can't Innovate
- MCLE Self-Study Article California’s Mandatory Fee Arbitration Act Benefits Attorneys by Providing an Efficient Mechanism to Resolve Legal Fee Disputes
- Message From the Chair: “To Cloud or Not To Cloud, That Is the Question”
- Message From the Editors
- You Want Us to Do What? One Firm's Successful Brand Development Story through Social Media Success
- Some Confessions & a Bit of Wisdom from a Fee Arbitrator
Some Confessions & A Bit of Wisdom from a Fee Arbitrator
By David S. White
“A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade.â€
— Abraham Lincoln, Attributed in Bulletin, Lincoln National Life Foundation, 11 July 1949
Give or take, I served as a volunteer Fee Arbitrator for the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Mandatory Fee Dispute Arbitration Panel for about 25 years. I stopped serving in that capacity about 6 years ago, when I began accepting employment as an occasional expert witness in attorney – client fee disputes. I write to share both some confessions and a bit of wisdom, gleaned from my experience.
I sat both as an individual arbitrator on fee dispute arbitrations, and, on occasion, as a panelist on a three-arbitrator panel, and in the latter part of the time I served in this capacity, I was generally the Lead Arbitrator of the panel. Helping lawyers and clients resolve fee disputes through conducting arbitrations was my way of ‘giving back’ to the legal community and to the judicial system in which I have made my living as an attorney, in this, now, my 37th year of law practice.