Other attorneys should really take a look at themselves and evaluate whether they are trying to bring an agency down because their own business is suffering.
Everything benefits from context. That comment was in the context of a poster defending against other comments about the performance of the 4th RC office. That's all well and good.
The receiving end has a context as well. That is, we private attorneys have been reading quotes from Florida politicians for over a year, and particularly during the FACDL quo warranto action, that, to get right down to it, imply that we private dependency attorneys are selfish luddites, saboteurs of innovation and tax savings for the people of Florida, just so we can get rich, Rich, RICH, off of court appointments.
Well, it has been easy to infer those things over the past year, and even before that, attending our local Indigent Services Committee meetings.
So, a year and a half after our ISC cut our rate from a low hourly one to a rather astonishingly low flat fee that drove 83% of our experienced attorneys off the local rotation list for dependency; one year after the RCs were established by law and I'd hope to make a go at consulting and helping the RCs get set up; 8 months after the RCs were supposed to begin taking cases, and 6 months after the RCs actually did begin taking cases; and finally, after the legislature cut our flat fee 20%, I have some thoughts.
Thought # 1: It's over. I have a pretty website called DependenyDefense.com, and I no longer intend to be a dependency defense attorney.
Thought #2: Buggy whip makers went out of business with the advent of the automobile (and then the polar bears drowned!) (Just kidding. Was that sarcasm or a heartfelt warning? I won't tell. I try to keep most politics out of this blog). So why can't private defense attorneys who used to make a living accepting court appointments quietly and graciously go out of business?
My answer to that question is that we already are out of business; we just haven't put the lock on the front door just yet. The 20% fee reduction, along with JAC's very creative methods of finding audit deficiencies that destroy any possibility of keeping a small firm's cash flow predictable, is, I fear the end of anyone truly specializing in private defense work.
The first reason for that is that people with money don't get into dependency court, poor people do. Therefore, for a private attorney to specialize enough to get really good at what he or she does, he or she must be somehow subsidized. So all along, we buggy whip makers were paid by the taxpayer for performing a public service.
The second reason for that is, while buggy whip makers went out of business or adapted to making automobile accessories, the substitution of the OCCCRCs for private attorneys is not the same. The RCs won't be producing automobiles, to stick to my analogy, they will still be providing the buggy whips. Same product, and the same funding source. What is different is that the RCs can't meet all of the demand, so we private buggy whip makers are asked to to keep our entire factory open to produce much less, and at a smaller subsidy per unit of product. Nobody can do that for very long.
That leaves diversifying. In my personal case, I have a contract for other services at the juvenile courthouse (AAL for children in residential treatment centers and with other needs for representation)that helps to cushion the fall from buggy whip making bliss, but that has two problems. One, it keeps me tied to the juvenile courthouse, where virtually all potential clients are indigent, and two, that I just had to renegotiate the contract and ended up agreeing to increase my caseload by 28% or take a 28% cut in the compensation. That's not a complaint; it is a blessing compared to those at the juvenile courthouse who don't have such an alternative source of income. Still, I can see the end. One rotation day a month in which I might receive one or two clients at the most, for $800 a case is untenable.
So diversify we shall. We've entered the age of government monopoly on buggy whip making. Since now everyone a parent will come in contact with during the course of a dependency case will be a government agent, let's hope they at least meet the promise of saving a whole lot of taxpayer money in the process. The age of private attorneys able to specialize in and devote all of their time to defending indigent clients in dependency court as a check on government agents is over.
I still have hopes that in the future the legislature will allow experimentation with bidded contracts.
No comments:
Post a Comment