Ethics - Withholding of Final Paycheck

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Malibu_Barbie

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Ok, this is a real situation, but I'm going to make it a similar hypothetical question for obvious reasons:

1) Attorney is hired by a law firm

2) Law firm fires attorney after 2 months of employment; no reason given

3) Law firm agrees to mail final paycheck to attorney

4) The day the final check is written and to be mailed, the attorney is requested by the law firm to email all billable time to the law firm, and that his/her final paycheck will be held until receipt of same

First off, the law firm has absolutely no policies/procedures manual regarding time entry, or anything else. The attorney was verbally told by staff that time entries have to be entered by the 1st of the month. The attorney was fired 10 days before the "1st of the month". The cases the attorney worked on were all contingent. therefore, the law firm's clients would not be billed, however, its efforts would be reported to the client.

My question is: Can a law firm withhold an attorney's final paycheck based on lack of time entries which would require the attorney to perform additional work in order to perform, and which the law firm refuses to pay?

If the attorney files a claim though the DOL, he/she will only receive minimum wage compensation for the hours owed ... not even worth the time to file a claim.

From previous legal research, I know that its unethical for an attorney or law firm to withhold a client's file for lack of payment, however, I'm wondering if this ethical standard applies to employees. By the way, this is a State of Florida matter. I will research it if you don't know, but it would certainly save me a LOT of time if you have an answer off-hand, and preferably quote some law to back it up. Thanks!
 
Malibu Barbie said:
Ok, this is a real situation, but I'm going to make it a similar hypothetical question for obvious reasons:

1) Attorney is hired by a law firm

2) Law firm fires attorney after 2 months of employment; no reason given

3) Law firm agrees to mail final paycheck to attorney

4) The day the final check is written and to be mailed, the attorney is requested by the law firm to email all billable time to the law firm, and that his/her final paycheck will be held until receipt of same

First off, the law firm has absolutely no policies/procedures manual regarding time entry, or anything else. The attorney was verbally told by staff that time entries have to be entered by the 1st of the month. The attorney was fired 10 days before the "1st of the month". The cases the attorney worked on were all contingent. therefore, the law firm's clients would not be billed, however, its efforts would be reported to the client.

My question is: Can a law firm withhold an attorney's final paycheck based on lack of time entries which would require the attorney to perform additional work in order to perform, and which the law firm refuses to pay?

If the attorney files a claim though the DOL, he/she will only receive minimum wage compensation for the hours owed ... not even worth the time to file a claim.

From previous legal research, I know that its unethical for an attorney or law firm to withhold a client's file for lack of payment, however, I'm wondering if this ethical standard applies to employees. By the way, this is a State of Florida matter. I will research it if you don't know, but it would certainly save me a LOT of time if you have an answer off-hand, and preferably quote some law to back it up. Thanks!
Great question but a completely different issue, at least from my take!

With regard to the issue of witholding a client's file, this is governed by the Rules of Professional Responsibility because it governs the attorney-client relationship. It is fundamental to that relationship and cannot be answered by simple contract law.

With regard to the attorney hiring attorney relationship, that would seem to be governed by employment/contract law. The reason why a firm might need your billables even for a contingency case would be to support the awarding of attorneys fees in the event the firm won the case for the client. They would need to justify the hours spent.

I would guess that your needing to provide them with billable hours was part of the agreed upon work that you performed. Thus until you provided them with the billables your work was not technically "complete." While this might be debatable, think about what you'll say in court to the judge who asks "counselor... are you really telling me that you didn't think that you had to submit billable hours to the firm to support its claims for attorneys fees and that doing so was "additional" work?" In addition, if you've been providing it before then it's difficult to say that you didn't know that this was part of the job.

I think the question you had here was whether there was any correlation to the "witholding file" issue and the "witholding paycheck." It seems there are different motivations for each. Your thoughts?
 
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