Government

Washington Post SHOCKED To Learn Lawyer Billed Clients For Lawyering

Framing Elizabeth Warren as a high-priced mercenary attorney is just plain dumb.

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Elizabeth Warren (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Rolling one’s eyes is usually the appropriate action whenever someone rails against the “failing” Washington Post for all of their “fake news.” But sometimes the publication is capable of tearing off a piece so off base that it has the unfortunate side effect of giving credence to all the hare-brained attacks.

It’s not that the Post’s coverage is incorrect. Senator Elizabeth Warren did represent multiple clients over the years and did charge those clients for her legal work. It’s that the story is a non-sequitur masquerading as news below a breathless headline seeking to stoke the basest of anti-professional biases.

“While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour”

BREAKING: Lawyer charges reasonable fees for lawyering. Is the argument that she couldn’t represent clients? There are certainly positions of authority within an academic institution that might preclude representing some clients, but Warren never held such a position. Comically, I suspect the very same voices who wailed about the injustice of Ron Sullivan being protested for representing Weinstein while serving as a dean will gleefully rip Warren for consulting on cases while a professor. There’s just no consistency to anything these people choose to complain about as Jed Shugerman points out:

No, this story gets slapped together and sent around because she charged $675 an hour and the paper hopes such a hefty hourly sum will stir up resentment from a public generally unaware of how much attorneys make. As we speak, it’s inevitably being turned into a meme by some hack social media specialist at Turning Point USA: “Warren says she cares about the middle class… then charges $675/hour!”

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This is the sort of junior varsity stuff that belongs in the New York Post. Elizabeth Warren, as a professor, was a leading legal expert and probably could have charged far more for her freelance legal opinions. If the media took the time to scratch the surface of high-stakes legal practice, they would learn that these fees are actually quite reasonable for the work and clientele involved.

Charitably, we could say the headline is making a point about the high cost of legal services. But that faux nobility doesn’t track. Attorneys charging $675/hour for complex litigation gets column width while lobbyists — like the lobbyists the Post’s owner pays handsomely to gin up tax breaks and squash regulation of his empire — get ignored? At a certain point, what a publication chooses not to care about is as much a story as what it does.

So, other than set up the “But Her Lawyering…” trope, what exactly does this story, framed as it is, accomplish? The story: “Warren Releases Information On Her Past Legal Work” would be just as newsworthy and have the benefit of not trafficking in disingenuous grievance farming. Never underestimate my affinity for the clickworthy headline, but it’s got to evince a baseline fairness. Framing a story around Warren’s hourly fee as if that’s newsworthy is just vacuous.

UPDATE: Since this article went up, it appears the Washington Post has made some changes to the story to downplay the framing around Warren’s hourly rate. I guess the criticism registered…

While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour [Washington Post]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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