It has been, on net, an excellent year for the Law Office with unprecedented growth and opportunities to meet the needs of Marylanders, residents of the District of Columbia and others with legal business between the Chesapeake and Potomac.
While solo attorneys do not speak of “departments” very often, the Law Office of Bruce Godfrey has established its procedures, policies and administration along “departmental” lines in the manner of a somewhat larger firm. The purpose of this model is to make room for staffing growth in the future so that when the needs of Office clients exceed the capacity of one senior attorney, the firm will be able to grow then due to the administrative groundwork laid now. Accordingly the Office has a traffic litigation department, an unemployment appeals department, a tax department, a collections department for small business collections, a criminal defense department with a focus on marijuana crimes as a subdepartment. Many of these departments have specific pages on this website in order to inform clients and potential clients about the services that we offer. I am gratified at the positive response to our online guides from clients, from other colleagues in the Maryland and North Carolina Bars and (less pleasantly) from the hordes of online legal marketing consultants who pester and bebother our small office. In particular, the guides to Maryland traffic court and Maryland unemployment insurance appeals have generated the strongest impact.
Many of the firm’s departments are designed to receive inquiries from clients with specific affiliations, interests and needs. The Office is proud to serve on the National Legal Committee of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; many inquiries regarding the scope of Maryland marijuana law including the scope of medical marijuana carve-outs come to our practice from referrals from NORML. The Office is pleased to be affiliated with the National Motorists Association; we receive a great many inquiries from NMA for Maryland traffic citations large and small. The Office by policy views firearms ownership as a civil rights issue and receives some inquiries regarding the regulation of firearms ownership, possession and use in Maryland, including from the National Rifle Association. Attorney Bruce Godfrey has had a relationship with Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc., or with the Maryland provider firm Weinstock, Friedman and Friedman for the better part of a decade; the Law Office is honored to accept referrals from Weinstock, from other nationwide PPL provider firms and from PPL headquarters in Oklahoma on many legal issues including, but not limited to, Maryland and District of Columbia “Title 2” traffic citations. [June 2011 update: while the Law Office of Bruce Godfrey is no longer conducting professional work with Weinstock Friedman and Friedman, we wish them well.] This list is illustrative of our affiliations but is not comprehensive.
Beyond these affiliations, the Office has enjoyed the opportunity to participate in commercial collections work. While by policy the firm will not represent large publically corporations against individual citizens, the firm has represented and will continue to represent individual private property owners in collecting back rent and damages from tenants who bounce rent checks on them, damage their homes and refuse to cooperate in the repairs or made good on the rent in some meaningful way. The firm is engaged in business-to-business collection work representing suppliers to wholesalers, retailers and distribution whose open invoices have not been paid. I will have more comments below on the “social policy” of the Law Office in this regard.
Over the next thirty days, the Law Office will be rolling out new resources for current clients and inquirers from the general public along with several new departments. There will be new pages greeting clients of specific affiliations including some listed above. Consistent with the overall spirit of the firm, the Law Office will be opening a Lemon Law Department to assist Marylanders in securing proper refunds for legally “dead-on-arrival” new cars from reluctant dealers and manufacturers, and will be providing useful content to Lemon Law claimants seeking help with their claims. The firm will also be opening a low-cost Wills Department to provide Marylanders not only simple wills but advance directives and medical powers of attorney in a low-cost bundle. The Law Office is also making a serious business examination of a virtual law office model to assist clients who are mobility impaired due to injury, geography or confinement, who work long hours or odd hours or otherwise live inconveniently to our office in the NW Baltimore County corridor. This “VLO” model is in the examination stage; we will take the final step on this business model if and only if we conclude that clients will enjoy real benefits from the model. If we do this after examination, it will be a BIG SPLASH event, but the examination of this model continues now. Since these items collectively are a long to-do list, there will be a staged roll-out of each these resources.
One of the (few) advantages of difficult economic times is that we – lawyers and non-lawyers alike – get the opportunity to clarify our values. Tough times make tough choices, which in turn mandate tough priorities, moral, professional and personal. Our firm has undergone by some standards a bit of a tough year, though a far better, more prosperous year than have many Americans and a far better first year than a cautious person would have expected. In the midst of challenging times, ethical people including but not limited to attorneys need to know their values, straighten their backs up and live in such a way that they don’t look away from the mirror in the morning. We take this time to clarify the values that guide and support our people-focused approach to practicing law.
When clients suffer, law firms feel it too. It’s hard to turn down decent people who want and deserve pro bono (no charge) services. Our firm currently has several pro bono clients and, by policy, always has one active pro bono case. We attorneys are encouraged strongly to do pro bono work and to support those who do by our Bar Associations and by our Court of Appeals in its Lawyers’ Rules of Professional Conduct. Bruce Godfrey has participated in a modest way on the Baltimore County Bar Association Pro Bono Committee. The firm additionally has made some modest pro bono resources available online to pro se litigants who cannot afford lawyers, and will continue to do so in the future.
By policy the Law Office does not do certain types of collection work; we do NOT collect medical bills, we do not represent large corporations or any commercial lenders against individuals and we elect not to pursue any collections work that, in our judgment, is unfair, oppressive or in any manner unlawful or contrary to fundamental notions of justice. We do NOT represent management against labor, ever; we are pro-union, pro-labor and pro-worker. By policy, we support the community organizers and community-based non-profits that assist survivors of sexual assault, abuse and predation; we do not do criminal defense work involving non-consensual sex crimes, but refer that work out to other lawyers immediately. The foregoing is NOT a criticism of those who do the work that we don’t do, but merely a statement of our professional values and policies.
While the firm accepts the “personhood” of corporations legally, it does not accept the moral “personhood” of a corporate entity as being equivalent to that of a flesh-and-blood human being. Corporations have unlimited life and limited liability; we human beings have neither. Corporations, particularly large corporations, are almost required by law to pursue the most ruthlessly pro-profit choice when faced with alternatives; the deliberate choice to do otherwise risks suits from stockholders for breach of fiduciary duties in small corporations and derivative suits in the case of large publicly traded companies. Put simply, corporations under U.S. law are almost required to behave in a manner comparable to a no-conscience sociopath. As an attorney, while I am required to pursue my client’s interest I am explicitly permitted to counsel my client to consider social, moral and political values before acting; corporations largely cannot do so except in the concept of protecting the interests of stockholders, few of whom exercise their own moral judgment and attend stockholders’ meetings.
Many of the corporate bad actors of our time – collusive Wall Street rating agencies who puffed up the pricing of derivatives, yielding a balloon burst that is still blasting across our country, BP’s reckless disregard for safety and procedure ruining much of an entire regional ecosystem, you name it – had high-priced legal help on the inside not only to help them deal with the aftermath, but to plan the bad deeds out in the first place. These lawyers’ material assistance in fraud and reckless disregard of violations of law and principles of conflicts of interest will probably not cost them anything; Bar discipline is a lot harder on a lawyer who mishandles a $50.00 doctor bill in an accident case than on the architecture of a $5 to 50 billion financial or ecological catastrophe. This firm conscientiously objects to this corporate use of our profession for such purposes and refuses to participate in the mega-corporate decision making process at any level, in any context, no exceptions.
While we do assist small businesses organize small business corporations for their purposes, we simply do not represent or advise publicly-traded corporations or other large corporations in contexts where control, moral judgment and equity stakes are meaningfully divorced. Again, we don’t criticize lawyers who do what we don’t do, but a human being, a lawyer, a law firm all need to know who they are, to whom they are committed and why. We are not anti-corporate in any absolutist sense; we buy supplies and equipment all the time from large companies at arms’ length (this Practice Update was written on a corporate computer sold by a corporate retailer), but we refuse professionally to owe a lawyer’s duties of loyalty, of care, of trust and of zealousness to Corporate America, Corporate Britain, Corporate Germany or Corporate China.
The price of these policies is, frankly, cash. The price of violating the policies, for those who share our values, is seeing a crooked, broken image when looking in the mirror in the morning. If you don’t know your magnetic north morally, you live your professional life running around in circles lost in the forest. None of this is intended as disrespect to those who disagree, but only as a criticism of trying to live one way at 9:00 AM and then the opposite way at 10:30 PM. This is not a complete statement of our practice’s values, but these are among our most important professional values of the firm.
If you are a human being who has the sorts of problems that we help solve, or you own and run a small business that can use our help, we would be honored to hear from you or to help you find the right lawyer for you. Thank you and our best wishes for a healthy and prosperous second half of 2010.
— Bruce Godfrey, Attorney at Law, August 3, 2010
Good Information… Thanks for sharing.