When it comes to fees, life for lawyers can get complicated. A recent decision of the N.Y. Court of Appeals, Marin v. Constitution Realty, 2017 WL 521504 (2017), the court considered whether to enforce the plain language of a contract between two lawyers for sharing legal fees when the lawyers had not complied with the requirements of the Rules of Professional Conduct. In Formal Opinion 2017-2, the New York City Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics addressed the problem of how to reconcile the duty to report a lawyer’s fraudulent billing under New York Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) 8.3 and the duty to preserve confidentiality under RPC 1.6.
‘Marin’
In Marin, the court enforced the lawyers’ contract, notwithstanding the violations of the applicable RPCs. The plaintiffs had employed Lawyer A and two attorneys whom she in turn had engaged to assist her, Lawyer B and Lawyer C, to represent them in a claim arising out of a construction site accident. The lawyers obtained an $8 million settlement for the plaintiffs, following and as a direct result of (but not during) mediation, at which point the fee dispute among them began. By way of background, as the court found, the written agreement among the lawyers
