The state wants to change the way judges assign lawyers to indigent clients. That proposal is raising concerns that local courts will lose some independence.
The state Supreme Court is proposing that attorneys submit bids to be on an approved list to represent those who can’t afford a lawyer.
Attorneys on the list – the low bidders – would be given the priority.
Greeneville attorney Robert Foster thinks the rule robs local judges of their ability to match lawyers with cases.
“The judge who knows those attorneys is much better suited to put attorneys with cases than…than big government in Nashville.”
Foster has a stake in the fight – he runs a billing service for some 400 attorneys who do indigent-client work. He makes sure the state pays them.
Laura Click, spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the Courts, says the proposal is basically a cost-saving measure–although the savings would depend on the prices attorneys set in their bids.
“And and so instead of paying you a little bit, drip drip drip drip, for each claim, our thought is that it would be so much easier to say, You know what? We’re gonna pay you this set amount to do all of them.”
Click says the proposed new system is not meant to centralize attorney appointments, and that local judges could still appoint their own choices.
Click says the new system is designed only for two simple kinds of cases — judicial hospitalization, where citizens are put into treatment by a court and child support contempt, where a parent behind in payments could be put into jail. Click acknowledges that nothing would stop the new system from being extended to many other types of indigent cases.
The proposal is open for public comment until September first. The state Supreme Court could then approve the new system, modify it, or stay with the current method.
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Click says attorneys who have already been doing the judicial hospitalization and child support contempt work will be invited to submit bids – in government-ese, reply to a “request for proposal” – and so many will end up practicing in the same courts they go to now.
“We would make sure the attorneys who have been doing judicial hospitalizations and child support contempt, we would reach out to them, make sure that they are notified of the RFP process… [But] Essentially it wouldn’t change the judges’ ability to appoint those local attorneys.”
Foster has traveled the state for the last month sounding the alarm about what he believes is a misplaced sense of priorities – cutting costs at the expense of local control.
“The Supreme Court of the state of Tennessee has proposed a rule that would take the current system and morph it into a contract-based system, as opposed to a local-based system. Contracts are centralized through Nashville, and the director of the Administrative Office of the Court selects the attorneys, and then tells the judge, ‘here’s your… slate of attorneys’…and that just removes the authority of the judge to appoint who he or she believes is the best attorney for the job.”
Foster says there are three good results from the present system:
• Judges can “grab an attorney that’s in the courtroom” to get the case cleared up with no delay.
• A judge seeing a difficult case before him can appoint an attorney who knows how to handle exactly that type of case.
• A judge can match a simple case with a fledgling attorney as a learning experience, training the new attorney so that he or she will become able to handle more difficult cases.
A highly placed judge speaking on background says that in such indigent care cases, out-of-court billing pays only $40 an hour and in court time is paid at $50 an hour. Most such cases pay only $500 to $800, according to the background source.
Indigent client cases include not only persons accused of felonies, but also cases that many would consider civil in nature – persons being committed to medical care by court order, or removal of a child (by a third party) from the custody of his or her parents. The key is whether a constitutional right is threatened.
In taking a child away from its parents, it is not unusual to have one appointed lawyer representing the parents and another appointed as “guardian ad litem” to represent the best interests of the child.
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