Opinion ID: 393164
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Implications for the Public Service Bar

Text: 17 Amici point out that a number of courts have approved market-value attorney's fee allowances directly to legal aid offices and public interest organizations. We are aware that at least nine circuits have vindicated such awards. 49 Those decisions, however, bear no relevance to the instant case. The Code of Professional Responsibility permits a lawyer to divide fees with or distribute them to other members of his law firm or law office, 50 and we see no reason why this authorization should not extend to public as well as private legal practitioners. 51 The same principle leaves a salaried attorney at liberty to surrender his fees to a public interest organization dedicated entirely to litigative activities. 52 18 These results, we think, are firmly rooted in sound policy. As the Third Circuit has noted, 19 (t)he award of fees to legal aid offices and other groups furnishing pro bono publico representation promotes the enforcement of the underlying statutes. ... Legal services organizations often must ration their limited financial and manpower resources. Allowing them to recover fees enhances their capabilities to assist in the enforcement of congressionally favored individual rights. 53 20 Other courts across the country are in accord. 54 We ourselves have observed that full-fee allowances to public interest law firms may be necessary to effectuate the private attorney's general concept implicit in much of Congress' antidiscrimination legislation. 55 Indeed, Congress itself has sanctioned such awards, at least in the civil rights area, for, as the Supreme Court recently observed, Congress (has) endorsed ... decisions allowing fees to public interest groups when it was considering, and passed, the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976 56 ...which is legislation similar in purpose and design to Title VII's fee provision. 57 The important consideration is that in these instances the fees are plowed back into the litigative programs that made their recovery possible in the first place. 21 Here, in contrast, there is no hint whatsoever that the sought-after fees would be similarly devoted. So far as we know, they would go toward enrichment of the union's coffers and support of its diverse operations. The amount over and above the union's actual cost, we reemphasize, would be a profit on the legal services generating the fees. The ethical exception for fee-splitting within a law office 58 obviously is not applicable, and the policies endorsed by Congress and the courts 59 are not implicated. As we have noted, full-fee awards are appropriate when the monies are to become the attorneys' own; 60 perhaps, too, such allowances would withstand criticism when the monies are directed into a fund for maintenance of a legal services program. 61 But the first of these situations is certainly not the one before us, nor from aught that appears is the second. 22