Denver criminal defense lawyer / lawyer responsibility and your money

When you hire a Denver criminal defense lawyer, you are trusting them with many things. Frequently it's your freedom or your criminal record. If your attorney screws up your case, it can be extremely costly in many ways. Another thing you will always be trusting them with is your money. Whether you pay your defense lawyer an hourly or a flat fee, you will be trusting them with your money. Why is that?

In the case of the hourly fee, you will give a sum of money called a retainer which the attorney will bill against as he accumulates hours. However, even in the case of a flat fee, the attorney can't just collect and keep the money up front. That's because you have the right to choose your attorney. If you don't like your attorney, you can fire them in the middle of the case (court permitting, more on this later) and get some of your money back.

Due to this rule, a lawyer must not simply take your flat fee and deposit it in his personal checking account. They have to break it up into chunks which are paid out of the trust account when milestones are achieved. So if a DUI costs $3,000 to defend, the attorney might get paid $750 at the outset, $750 at arraignment, $750 on receiving discovery, and $750 at the conclusion of the case. But while the money sits in the attorney's trust / escrow account, that money is still technically the client's and the client is entitled to get it back should the relationship be terminated.

As you can imagine, a lawyer's responsibility to correctly account for client funds in his trust account is a very serious thing. That's why stuff like this story is a little bit scary:

Because the payment was a private deal between the plaintiff, Daniel Burrage, and legal secretary Susan Pack, Mobile County Circuit Judge Michael Youngpeter ruled Tuesday, the attorney for whom Pack had worked for 27 years, Johnny Lane, wasn't responsible for Pack's theft of the money, Burrage had planned to use the money to pay off the mortgage on Pack's home, which was in foreclosure, and then split the proceeds with her when it was subsequently sold by Pack at fair-market value after she fixed it up. But due to a drug issue, Pack was fired by Lane, and when Burrage asked for his money back, it was missing from the client trust account, along with another $115,000 or so, the Birmingham News reports. She is also accused of forging signatures on client settlement checks to obtain the money for herself.

The client is somewhat at fault here for engaging the legal secretary in an illegal and under the table deal to use the trust money for this scheme. But on the other hand this is an ugly episode for the attorney. Attorneys are responsible for keeping correct accounting on the trust account. There's no excuse for that amount of money to simply go missing.

This cuts to another very important issue. Attorneys need to be responsible for the actions of their subordinates. The rules of lawyer ethics are absolutely clear on this. So when an attorney turns over the keys of his trust account to a legal secretary he's also taking responsibilities for the secretary's action and needs to be sure to monitor that activity more closely.