Q: What's the ethical issue when you realize your client overpaid the bill?
A: Should you tell your law partners?
It's an old joke, and is told in various ways. (For details, see Marc Galanter's book.) But a recent discipline case in New Jersey asks if it was unethical for a lawyer to accept a $50,000 gift from a client and not inform his law partners.
In years past, I have asked my students this multiple choice question (strictly tongue in cheek):
You are Able. Baker, your only partner at Able & Baker, is out of town taking depositions.
Mr. Kramer enters your office seeking a simple will, which you prepare for $100. Preferring cash transactions, Kramer hands you a crisp new $100 bill and departs—whereupon you realize that Kramer inadvertently had handed you two new $100 bills stuck together. This raises an obvious ethical dilemma. Should you:
(A) Put the extra $100 in your wallet; or
(B) Split the extra $100 with you law partner.
I kept a collection of good responses, but this one, from a student whose name I can't recall, is my favorite:
An extra Ben Franklin he gave me,
So I'm thinking ethically, maybe,
If half without pause
To the judge's pet cause,
The rest can be spent on my baby.