WHY BIG FIRMS DON'T WORK        

"Why take 30 minutes to do the easy thing when you can bill 12 hours for the same result?"

We will keep the identity of the offending attorney to ourselves because it appears that the newly-minted associate involved was being forced to act as he did by higher-ups. However, this is another illustration of how a large firm billed its client thousands of dollars to bring an unnecessary motion with no real goal in sight.

The firm in question is a large Century City firm. As is usually the case, a partner's name appears on the pleadings, but in reality the matter is handled by an associate. In this case, the associate was fresh out of law school.

The case involved a commercial real estate lease.  The associate handling the matter propounded a large set of interrogatories to our client. As a new attorney, he apparently was not familiar with the rule requiring that interrogatories be self-contained. In other words, each question must be answerable standing alone, and cannot require reference to other materials. Here is the sort of question he asked:

"Special Interrogatory No. 33: Identify the provision and/or provisions of the January 31, 2005 lease agreement, attached to your First Amended Complaint as Exhibit A, that makes the lease subject to subsequent oral modifications as alleged in your response to Form Interrogatory 17.1 regarding response to Request for Admission No. 7."

By any measure, this interrogatory is not self-contained and is therefore improper. But rather than to take time preparing and serving objections and then potentially responding in court to a motion to compel, we took a much more efficient route. We contacted opposing counsel, explained the rule to him, and offered to answer the questions if he would just reword them to exclude all of the references to external documents. For example, the above interrogatory can be asked as follows:

"Special Interrogatory No. 33: Identify the provision and/or provisions of the January 31, 2005 lease agreement you contend makes the lease subject to subsequent oral modifications."

So, in 30 minutes to an hour, the attorney could have just stripped out the improper language contained in the questions and had the questions answered with no delay. But following that approach would have deprived the firm of numerous billable hours. The firm refused our offer to reword the questions and insisted that we had to answer them just as they had been propounded. This forced us to simply object to the questions as improper. The firm responded with a motion to compel, and sought $2,700 in sanctions. In other words, they went to court to defend the right to ask what were clearly improper questions!  The motion was supported with a 50-page brief and separate statement, which counsel claimed took 12 hours to prepare (plus the time that would be necessary to attend the hearing). We invested an hour preparing an opposition, to which opposing counsel responded with another large brief.

At the hearing, the court chastised opposing counsel for bringing the motion, and suggested that he accept our offer to reword the questions. The motion for sanctions was, of course, denied.

So what did opposing counsel accomplish? They prejudiced their clients' case by delaying receipt of the responses by two months when they could have had them immediately. They irritated the judge that would be hearing the case. And for these services, the client was billed perhaps $5,000.

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Aaron P. Morris is a Partner with the law firm of Morris & Stone, LLP, located in Santa Ana, Orange County, California. He can be reached at (714) 954-0700, or amorris@toplawfirm.com.  The practice areas of Morris & Stone include employment law (wrongful termination, sexual harassment, wage/overtime claims), business litigation (breach of contract, trade secret, partnership dissolution, unfair business practices, etc.), real estate and construction disputes, first amendment law, Internet law, discrimination claims, defamation suits, and legal malpractice.