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And This is Why We Get a Bad Name ...

By Justin Bathon

So, this is why we lawyers get a bad name. A school district lawyer in New York has been suspended from his law firm and is under investigation for being employed by multiple school districts as well as law firms as outside counsel. Apparently, he was hired as a full-time employee in five separate school districts at the same time and the ABA Journal reports he was credited with working 1,286 days in one year.  So ... yeah, not good.

One thing I have been seeing more and more of lately, though, are attorneys being hired as actual district employees, as this fella was. Used to be that only some of the largest districts in the country employed General Counsels, your Chicago's, LA's and whatnot, and everyone else just retained law firms. But, now many medium sized districts are beginning to employ an attorney as part of the district leadership team. This is something new and does warrant some investigation. What are these attorneys at these medium sized districts doing? How are they prepared for this job? Are they working for multiple districts (preferably under agreements which reduce their time for each instead of what this New York guy did). Just how much influence on the decisions of the district do they control? These are all questions that I am not really sure we have answers to at the moment and for any of you young edjurists out there, this would make a really nice study.  We need to get our head around this issue of K-12 school district general counsels. It is becoming a large enough pool of individuals that we need to start examining them more in depth. As long as we are blind to this issue, there will be more room for shady individuals, like this one in New York, to game the system.

Full post as published by Edjurist on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).