In-House Counsel

Cheating Or Not? A Mental Exercise For Lawyers.

There are rules that govern legal ethics; only your own conscience governs cheating. 

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I was recently thinking about cheating.

This is harder than mere legal ethics.  There are rules that govern legal ethics; only your own conscience governs cheating.  And there aren’t any law school classes on the type of cheating that I’m thinking about.

For example, when I worked in the midwestern office of a law firm, there was a guy who liked to get his hair cut by a specific barber in New York.  Like clockwork, this person would arrange for a business trip to New York once every three weeks, ensuring that he was perfectly groomed and that he never had to pay the airfare for his coiffure.

Cheating?

The client never objected to any of the trips.  

On the other hand, the client was told only that the lawyer was going to New York to interview witnesses, or whatever; the client never learned that the trips happened to coincide with the need to see a stylist.

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How about the person who schedules a business trip to Paris for the weekend of his 25th wedding anniversary?  Is that just a convenience of timing, and thus perfectly proper, or does that begin to raise eyebrows?  How about the person whose child now lives on the East Coast, and so business takes the person to the East Coast now more often than it did before?  Cheating?  Or just conveniently scheduling stuff to let you tend to personal matters when traveling on business flights?

I’m working up a head of steam here:  You fly to D.C. to meet one of your partners and a client over dinner.  The client doesn’t show up.  Your partner says, “You’re traveling, and I’m not.  Let’s have dinner, and you expense the cost.  It’s easier for the person who’s traveling to get reimbursed for the expense.”

Did you properly charge the firm for both dinners?  One?  Neither?

Here’s another one:  The partner in charge of an office routinely charges the firm for lunches with his colleagues at the firm.  Everyone else who’s similarly situated pays for their own lunches when they go out with one of their colleagues.  But the partner in charge deems the event to be business, and he charges the firm.

That must be legitimate, right?  A partner in charge of an office would never cheat the firm.  (That same partner in charge, however, might disallow the expense if someone else tried to charge the cost of lunch to the firm:  “You were just eating lunch with Jarndyce?  Why the heck is that the firm’s expense?  Pay for it yourself!  I don’t want to ever catch you doing this again!”)

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How about this:  You really must fly to Denver to meet with a client.  But your firm has recently gotten stingy about business development expenses.  So you charge the trip (as a billable expense) to the client, and then you write off that expense at the end of the month (so the firm, and not the client, ultimately picks up the tab).  Cheat or no cheat?

I’m really just scratching my head about these things.  There tend to be answers to questions about legal ethics.  But there are no answers when you’re thinking about ethics alone.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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