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The Homefront
Megafirm Holland & Knight established an office in Boca in January and plans to add more lawyers. New York-based Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn also expanded recently. The 10-lawyer Sachs firm includes state Sen. Ron Klein, D-Palm Beach, as a partner.
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CONSUMER DEBT
To His Credit
A federal bankruptcy judge spoke for a lot of critics when he vented his frustration with the credit card industry. In a Chapter 7 case involving a couple who had suffered a job loss, Judge Robert Mark of Miami blasted companies for issuing cards willy-nilly, then running to bankruptcy court to allege that the cardholders ran up their bills fraudulently. Debts incurred by fraud generally aren't dischargeable and must be repaid.
Mark accused the companies of "institutional hypocrisy" for failing to check on cardholders' ability to pay until after they apply for bankruptcy protection. The case involved AT&T Universal Card Services.
"If credit issuers want to continue their policy of soliciting consumers to use their cards with little regard for their financial ability, that is fine," Mark wrote. "If card companies want to file complaints to except fraudulent credit card debt from discharge in a bankruptcy case, that is fine too. What this court will not condone are the different and indeed hypocritical standards applied by credit card companies like AT&T in pursuing these otherwise permissible business and legal pursuits."
Mark ordered AT&T to pay the debtor $2,600 in fees and costs.
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LEGAL FEES
No-Frills Law
Sherrie Marcus wants to provide discount legal services - good enough to satisfy the Bar's tough professional standards, yet cheap enough to lure a mass market. And while her firm may not be big-box size yet, the example she's setting in a converted North Miami Beach tract home near I-95 is attracting a lot of attention from other lawyers.
Says Terry Russell, who heads a Florida Bar committee that's studying new ways to allow lawyers to market more low cost legal services: "Sherrie is one lawyer in the state who's already doing it quite successfully."
Marcus' secret: her basic services are provided almost exclusively by on-staff paralegals. For most of her customers, paralegals perform not just the legwork, but also the legal office work, right down to retrieving and filling out forms. Marcus herself seldom sees most of her customers and isn't even their official attorney.
Instead, clients sign a disclosure agreeing that they get only a guarantee that the paperwork is accurate and acceptable to a court. Marcus trains her paralegals and supervises their work, but customers who must go to court usually are on their own. The system allows Marcus' office to provide basic services as cheaply as $49 for a simple quitclaim deed. An uncontested divorce with a marital settlement costs $259. If Marcus herself did the work, she says she'd have to bill $2,000 to $2,500.
Marcus, a former social-services worker, says she got the idea for her service after Hurricane Andrew left lots of ordinary people in need of legal help, at a time when financial pressures on them were acute. Marcus decided to refocus her solo law practice on providing bargain-basement legal services.
"There were thousands of people in Dade County who were selling or quitclaiming their homes; they were wiped out," she explains. "It seemed to me there was no effective way to fulfill their legal needs at a price they could afford. I thought it was time to tailor a practice around what the public needed."
Her approach has drawn frequent scrutiny from the Bar's disciplinary arm. So far, Marcus hasn't been hit with a penalty, but she's had to tweak her formula, for example, by changing the name of her office from the slick "Ameri-Legal" to the more sedate "Sherrie B. Marcus, Esq."
Now, other lawyers are looking at Marcus as a potential model, because of the large and apparently growing numbers of people who are going to court unrepresented these days. Chief Justice Gerald Kogan of the Florida Supreme Court describes the problem of unrepresented litigants "a real nightmare."
The source of the problem, Kogan says, is that lawyers often set their fees unrealistically high. Wealthy people can afford them; poor people don't have to pay them because they receive free legal-aid services. But middle-class people often get stuck representing themselves and stumble over the complexities and arcane language of the court system.
To make matters worse, a substantial number of those unrepresented litigants are turning for help to independent, often ill-informed paralegals, known as "legal technicians," who can add to the problems. Legal technicians have grown rapidly in numbers since the late 1980s, especially in Florida and California.
Kogan and many Bar leaders believe that if they could find a way for lawyers to market cheaper services, more unrepresented people would be getting better advice. Some Bar leaders also think the service would create an opportunity for young lawyers building traditional practices in the crowded legal field.
Still, a lot of lawyers harbor strong doubts about associating their names with services provided directly by paralegals. But more lawyers are seeing that their efforts to prosecute legal technicians for the unlicensed practice of law are failing.
"I don't think anybody really wants this," Fort Lauderdale attorney Michele Kane Cummings says of the paralegal trend, "but it's kind of a fait accompli. You're not going to make the independent ones go away - that's for sure."
Legal Briefs
Broad and Cassel lawyer Kelly P. Campolo of Miami has retired at 27 to go back to her hot suntan lotion company, South Beach Sun, which she expects to triple sales this year ... William R. Nuernberg, a partner in the Miami office of Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, has been named partner-in-charge of that office. Nuernberg also serves as administrator of Eckert Seamans' corporate finance section and co-administrator of the intellectual property section ... Larry Stumpf joined the litigation practice group of the Miami office of Akerman, Senterfitt & Eidson. He previously was with Rubin Baum Levin Constant Friedman & Bilzin of Miami.
