“How to Survive the Police”

This link may be useful to some readers. “How to Survive the Police” is a guide to just that: getting out of an undesired encounter with law enforcement as quickly and safely as possible, while preserving your legal rights. I am honored that Avvo.com selected my article as a “Staff Pick” for their site.

Posted by Bruce Godfrey in Criminal Law, 0 comments

Appeal Forms for Circuit Court Unemployment Appeals (Modified: May 2017)

Maryland’s Court of Appeals urges attorneys to provide “pro bono publico” (for the benefit of the public) assistance to persons of limited means, to assist in the fight to protect the rights of historically disadvantaged groups and to assist in the overall improvement of the legal system as a whole – at no charge or at a very substantially reduced charge. We are urged to spend 50 hours per year, i.e about 1 hour per week, assisting in these important activities. Most of us don’t meet that goal, but all of us should try to provide that pro bono help or at least to provide financial support to the lawyers and agencies that do provide these services as their main purpose (e.g. Legal Aid, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, so many pro bono agencies working on a shoestring, etc.)

As noted elsewhere, my firm dedicates a substantial portion of its time to assisting unemployed workers, almost all of whom are by definition persons of “limited means” – if you just lost your job, your means probably just got limited severely. However, our firm ordinarily does charge for our services in unemployment representation, subject to the regulations that protect workers from unfair or excessive legal fees.

Sometimes an attorney cannot afford to represent a worker, particularly a worker who comes to our office late in the appeals process, after the Board of Appeals has issued a final ruling and Circuit Court is the only remaining appeal route. What we can do, however, is to make it easier for such workers slightly to represent themselves and preserve their appeal rights, either while they arrange for funds to retain an attorney or to represent themselves if they so choose.

Many workers receive the proper advice that appeals (technically, petitions for judicial review) of Maryland agency decisions including decisions of the Division of Unemployment Insurance have to be filed in Circuit Court timely pursuant to Rule 7-202. In the age of the internet, many workers conduct their own research online to try to find out how to represent themselves in these cases, or at least to preserve their appeal rights timely and properly. The most popular website for free legal research in Maryland is probably www.michie.com, but Michie’s layout for Rule 7-202 is not particularly helpful. In that Rule, the Maryland Court of Appeals provided a suggested layout for petitions for judicial review, but due to limitations of the internet the Rule and form do not render very well on the internet. The paper volume containing Rule 7-202 is reasonably clear, but the electronic format online at Michie does not mesh well with internet formatting.

Accordingly I am happy to provide a sample form for no charge for those who would like to file their own unemployment petitions for judicial review in Maryland courts. The form’s layout complies with the substance of Rule 7-202 but contains additional formatting and content that the Rule or Circuit Court clerks require find helpful, specifically for unemployment appeals. I did not provide a fill-in-the-blank form for ethical and professional responsibility reasons, but I hope that the form may be useful to workers and private practitioners new to this practice area.  Additionally, the form contains a required ethical disclosure that an attorney outside the case assisted in the preparation of the form.

There is no fee or other license requirement for the use or copying of the form; anyone may do so for any reason. I would request that anyone using the form for any purpose drop me a line at godfrey @ jezicfirm.com (changed: May 2017), but this is not a requirement. I would also request that any practicing lawyer using the form either take one case pro bono or make a donation in the amount of a quarter of his or her billable hour, or one hour’s pay rate, to a suitable pro bono organization, but this is NOT a requirement or condition.

Again, this is not a requirement for using the form, just a request that you say “Hi” and that you help the greater pro bono effort if you are a lawyer. Thank you in advance to everyone, including especially any attorneys helping in pro bono efforts.  This is NOT an offer of pro bono representation generally.  To get the form, please email me at the address given above.

Posted by Bruce Godfrey in Unemployment, 0 comments

The World Doesn’t Owe Lawyers A Living

Sometimes I do not recognize the world as the one I grew up in. This bizarre tale of a new attorney who went, more or less, berserk against a potential employer who didn’t want to hire him as a paralegal leads me to ask whether the “the world owes me a living” attitude of the young man comes from generational experiences, geographical origins or is simply and purely a result of this one man’s peculiar and twisted outlook on life.

Lawyering isn’t easy and getting the first job isn’t easy for a young lawyer, even one with top grades from top-flight schools. Economic changes have moved large parts of “BigLaw” to India for processing. According to one estimate, 30-35% of litigation costs in large litigation by one estimate come from document review in the age of Microsoft Office, and there are lots and lots of English-speaking, high work-ethic attorneys in India who will work for 1/4 of a U.S. lawyer’s salary (with proportionate low personal overhead on their end.) While what my practice does – unemployment litigation, traffic disputes, misdemeanor criminal defense, debt collection work, etc.- cannot be outsourced to Bangalore or Hyderabad (or Manila, or Lagos, or Johannesburg, etc.), big law firms are vulnerable to outsourcing for much of their work.

One of the disturbing trends I have seen out of Generation Y’s cohort in law school is referring to legal work for live human beings, rather than for large corporations, as so-called “Third Tier Toilet” work, referring to law schools of lower (or no) prestige. I view the so-called “TTT” chatter as a way for frustrated law students – and possibly those who want to maintain BigLaw’s cultural prestige within legal education” – to kick dirt on the faces of clients looking up from the bottom of the economic well. It is a nasty sort of class-consciousness inversion – lawyers fearful of (or competing for talent with) blue collar law, poverty law, law for real persons not artificial corporate persons, passing on their own anxieties about their careers (or others’ careers) onto the backs of clients and areas of practice that don’t carry corporate prestige and insane salaries/workloads.

A new associate at major BigLaw firms may make $160,000 per year. In other words, she or he has two full-time $80,000.00 jobs, in one paycheck. Her or his salary requires that she bill at least $500,000 per year under 1:3 rule of salary:billings. At $225/hour, this requires billing 2200 hours per year; many law firms require much more. Who can pay $225/hour for a first year associate and three times that for a partner? Large corporations facing millions, even billions in opportunities and risks. Poverty law works differently – the high-stakes cases come often for the clients LEAST able to pay, not MOST able. Same with workers’ comp, unemployment cases, traffic cases for motorists who will get fired if they get their license suspended, criminal cases for young people who may want a job someday – high stakes cases very often accompany the inability to pay.

There is no way to bridge the gap mentally betwen the welder with 18 years’ seniority who just got fired over a petty squabble with a supervisor, and a 25 year-old law school grad who looks upon representing that welder as trivial, so trivial that any employer who won’t hire him deserves to be threatened and called a “career predator,” as did the new attorney in the case linked above. It’s part of a sick, inhuman mindset that looks about the legal profession as a bank vault to be raided, rather than as a craft to be done well for those who most need it. I see a connection between dismissing the profitability of middle-class law for the lawyer, dismissing the importance of the client’s case morally and dismissing the entire blue-collar and middle-class clientele en masse as “Third Tier Toilet” people.

Nobody owes a lawyer a living. Lawyers do not exist for their own sake, but to assist clients whom the law affects – sometimes for a profit, sometimes not. Lawyers entering the profession with the opposite mindset should go into vanity plastic surgery for Hollywood instead (this is not to disparage reconstructive or therapeutic plastic surgery.) There are no Third Tier Toilet clients; if you look at the legal rights of clients as being of a lower tier, or as the clients themselves as beneath you, please turn in your law license and go sell luxury cars to corrupt government officials in oil-exporting countries instead. There’s nothing wrong with preferring a high salary or corporate work; it’s the “the world owes me a BigLaw fat paycheck” mentality among some young lawyers that I find extremely offensive.

The Law Office of Bruce Godfrey proudly represents the unemployed, the accused, the forgotten, the marginalized and the damned. If BigLaw looks down on my clientele, or on me for representing real people, good. Looking down on people as people is a mistake worth punishing, and it’s always a good idea not to interrupt an opponent or competitor when they are making a serious mistake.

Posted by Bruce Godfrey in commentary, 0 comments

A solid management summary of Maryland unemployment Law

Chris Brown, Esquire, of the Columbia-based Business and Technology Law Group has an excellent summary of the law and procedure in Maryland unemployment appeals. While my perspective as a pro-labor, pro-worker and pro-union attorney differs substantially from that of a corporate attorney, and I would probably use a different lexicon to as a labor advocate than did BTLG in this article, the outline of the law and procedure is solid. Chris Brown and his firm have my full professional respect; any employer would do well to consider BTLG for its legal needs.

Posted by Bruce Godfrey in Unemployment, 0 comments