In-House Counsel

Half Of Being A Good Attorney Is Showing Up

Even if you are clearly outside of your element, your fellow attorneys are willing to help. Show up and see what happens.

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Last week, I received a panicked call from an attorney attached to one of our more remote hospitals.

“I hate to do this to you, but I need to engage outside counsel and fast. I just received notice that we have a 341 hearing this afternoon and I know next to nothing about bankruptcies and have never even stepped foot in the federal district court. Please help, and fast!”

By way of brief explanation, while our hospital maintains a corporate executive office, including the general counsel’s office, each of our individual hospitals maintains their own C-suite as well as in-house counsel. We have found having an attorney physically located at each of our hospitals allows for us to be able to more closely monitor risk, respond to events in real time, and it has the added benefit of currying favor with the local judicial community.

For a typical 341 hearing, which is simply a meeting of creditors in a bankruptcy case, we would dispatch one of our corporate in-house counsels with bankruptcy experience to the hearing to support the local attorney. However, given this particular hospital was several hours away, it was impossible to get our corporate attorney there in time, thus necessitating the ask for outside counsel.

After listening a bit more to the facts of this particular case, I advised the attorney to attend the hearing on their own without the support of outside counsel.

No less than 30 minutes later, the attorney called me back and stated his CEO demanded they be represented by outside counsel and we needed to approve it with haste.

After a quick consultation with a member of my team with far more bankruptcy experience than I, I again advised my colleague to attend the hearing on their own and report back.

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Begrudgingly, he agreed and our phone call ended.

A few hours later, I received a call from the attorney to give me an update on the case. He stated that many of the creditors did not attend, and despite his own inexperience in the area of law, the trustee appreciated his attendance. He relayed that the trustee, and even the counsels representing other creditors, were more than happy to help him in his first appearance in both the bankruptcy proceeding and in federal court.

Which leads me to the title of this post, half of being a good attorney is just showing up.

We work in a field where, thankfully, collegiality reigns supreme. As a member of the Bar, even if you are clearly outside of your element, my experience has shown my fellow attorneys are willing to help.

Too often attorneys are more prone to blow off a deadline or appearance rather than to show up and plead ignorance. My co-counsel at our remote hospital was viewed favorably simply for showing up. Given that dozens of other co-creditors failed to even make the time for the hearing, simply being present won the day.

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Moving forward, I will ensure our attorney will be supported by one of our corporate counsels, but in the interim, by appearing on his own without the aid of outside counsel, he saved our hospital countless thousands of dollars and still curried favor with our local judicial branch.

Not a bad day in the office for someone who claimed to be ill-equipped to carry out the day’s task.

Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at [email protected].

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