Dear all:

The lawyers on this list may disagree with my own experience so please correct me if I 
am misrepresenting my naive view. However, I want to pipe up with what I perceive as a 
very real legal danger from the scope of practice as written. 

I do NOT believe that a lawyer fending for client's rights would necessarily take the most 
benign interpretations of the scope of practice that we would like to believe would 
happen.  THe role of a lawyer is to get the best deal for their client, not to ensure the 
most fair deal for others who may be implicated as not having provided adequate care for 
their client.

I base this on two experiences with lawyers --- one a very good LEARNING experience, 
the other a very GOOD vindication experience.

So, starting with the good LEARNING experience, I naively hired a desperate friend who 
begged me for work for a 3-week consultancy.  I needed a literature review to be 
completed and she needed the work.  She had just completed a 6-month consultancy with 
a major pharmaceutical firm after being laid of from an academic appointment.  She was 
deeply troubled at the time because she was going through a lawsuit over "theft of 
intellectual property" which was actually written up in Science magazine.  I should have 
known better because she got so mired down in her lawsuit that she couldn't function in 
academia and she also couldn't function well as a consultant for the pharmaceutical 
company.  The end result was that she sued the pharmaceutical company based on NY 
City employment laws that protect consultants from being hired for short periods of time 
without benefits and then fired at a convenient time when those benefits would kick in.  I 
was totally stupefied when the lawyer grilled me over the possibility that I might steal my 
former friend's "intellectual property" which was a literature review and publish 
something (for a nonprofit save the blind organization) that would rip her off.  He wasn't 
the least bit interested, nor could I get in a word edgewise about the fact that I was out 
of the country the entire time she was doing the lit review, she didn't have office 
priviledges (which are two of the provisions for the law about whether one is an 
employee or a consultant) and she only worked for me for 3 weeks.  The lawyer for the 
the nonprofit company that I worked for actually blew it because my former friend won 
on a technicality because she hadn't responded to one of the faxes within the amount of 
time specified.  I was left scratching my head over the fact that no one really cared about 
whether any of this was fair or not.  My former friend never had the heart to collect any 
benefits from my organization, because in violation of what my organization said, I called 
up my former friend and chewed her out.

Then, the GOOD vindication experience was when the nonprofit organization that I worked 
for did a fairly typical nose dive.  Often, those who are at the top of nonprofits are 
actually failures in the business world.  Nonprofits cannot hire people at the top who are 
really good because they can't afford them. Then you have an underneath layer of the 
technical people who try to do the work and don't know how to manage.  So they end up 
scrambling around trying to figure out how to do their jobs anyway despite very poor 
management and not really knowing much about management themselves.  I was hired 
right after the president of the organization had just gone through a paranoid fit and fired 
everyone who was technically good.  I didn't know about this until I was hired into a 
skeleton staff of survivors.   Four years later,  I could see the signs of another paranoid 
wave starting up again.  He had violated many rules involving US government grants. I 
kept documentation on the violations, and watched for the hiring of a "management 
consultant".  The last time around the "management consultant" called everyone in for 
supposedly confidential conversations about how to fix the organization.  Those who told 
the truth, got "reorganized out".  The few who lied stayed.  So I watched over the course 
of the next three years and documented everything.  Then when the management 
consultant appeared, I deliberately "reorged" myself out by telling the absolute truth 
about what I thought would fix the place.  My lawyer was great.  A group of us banded 
together and had the president dead to rights on age discrimination, gender 
discrimination, racial discrimination, and the whistle blower laws.  All I did was state that 
I had a lawyer, told them what I wanted as a severance package, they gave it to me, and 
I left happily within 2 days of starting negotiations.  One person that really went go ho on 
"suing" spent many years of angst and got no more money than I did,  and she never felt 
vindicated.  Those that didn't use the lawyer to back them, thinking that they would be 
taken care of fairly, got next to nothing.  Those of us that played just a bit of hard ball 
and got out quickly went on to quickly to more enjoyable work with minimal trauma.  I 
learned a bit from the first experience, got a good lawyer who taught me a little more for 
the second experience.  I hope I never have to have a third experience, but I want to be 
prepared just in case.  

I have to say, from these two experiences with lawyers, that believing that someone will 
take the most benign interpretation of your good work and protect you may not work.  
That is why I want a scope of practice that even a lawyer can respect!

Best, Susan Burger.

             ***********************************************

Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html
Mail all commands to [log in to unmask]
To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask])
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask])
To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]