E-Mail Points to Overbilling by Law Firm
1. This article summarizes a pending lawsuit against a legal firm that apparently engages in overbilling its clients as a general practice. The case against the firm has been documented through e-mails that exposed attorneys who are engaging in the practice and were exchanging e-mails that joked about “churning those bills:” this referred to performing useless activities simply to inflate the charges to clients. This has resulted in the exploitation of the firm’s clients who are being damaged by the monetary losses they are incurring from hiring lawyers in this firm. The moral issue is the belief that it is acceptable to create unnecessary work that benefits the firm in order to increase an unsuspecting client’s bill.
2. The practice of inflating charges by attorneys by performing trivial or unnecessary activities is wrong because it takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of clients who have placed their trust in the lawyers to help them with some situation in which they have already been wronged. Such clients are depending on the attorney who is representing them, and are virtually at his or her mercy to do right by them. The moral problem involved here is that the attorneys are placing their own self interests above those of the clients.
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3. I believe that one remedy for this situation would be to have the attorneys work on a contingency basis, whereby they receive a portion of the settlement if the client prevails in a lawsuit, or in such cases where this may not be pertinent or realistic, the total charge involved should be agreed to before any work on the case begins. That way, the attorneys have an incentive to streamline their hours and work as efficiently as possible in order to accomplish the best results possible using the least amount of time. In that way, the attorneys benefit because if they are able to put in fewer hours to accomplish the same amount of work, that frees up additional time for them to use in other ways; this would benefit the clients as well, because their legal matters would be resolved as quickly as possible and they would be well aware of the final costs involved throughout.
Assembly Panel to Review Deal on Luxury Suite
1. This article describes a $130 million deal between the Cuomo administration and the Buffalo Bills team to keep the team in New York while including a 12-seat luxury box to be available for the use of administration officials. The moral issue here revolves around fairness, because the New York taxpayers are funding this amenity that will clearly only benefit people who work for the governor. On one hand, citizens in New York will benefit from the team remaining in their region, but the amount of tax money used for this negotiation might not have been as high if this benefit had not been added into it.
2. This issue is morally wrong because it is simply not appropriate for state officials to receive free tickets to sporting events merely because they work for the state government. It is a conflict of interest for people who are negotiating the terms of a contract to benefit personally from those terms at the expense of the people who are footing the bill.
3. I believe that this problem can be resolved if either the deal is renegotiated, omitting the provision of the luxury box completely, which would perhaps allow the state to negotiate a deal for less money. Another alternative would be to keep the box but to make it available for average citizens by holding a lottery to allow different people to attend the games and sit in that luxury box at various points along with one or two state officials. The state could randomly choose people from the voter rolls or the census to provide them with this opportunity, while saving one or two seats for people in the administration for each game.
References:
Hakim, D. (2013, March 25). Assembly Panel to Review Deal on Luxury Suite. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/nyregion/assembly-panel-to-review-cuomos-stadium-suite-deal.html
Lattman, P. (2013, March 25). E-Mail Points to Overbilling by Law Firm. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from The New York Times: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/suit-offers-a-peek-at-the-practice-of-padding-a-legal-bill/
