Catching Bad Lawyers

             The Bad Behaviors of Service Professionals

Can you really work 36 hours a day? No. Can you charge in that many hours? Some service professionals have tried.

Stuart Maue is a legal auditing firm that finds out which firms have been naughty or nice. (See Baseline's 12/2006 issue "Throwing the Book At Wayward Lawyers", www.baselinemag.com) They got a nice profile piece on them in the current issue of Baseline.

It's a shame that companies need to hire auditors to check-up on their service providers. If you're a service provider and you've been able to get away with any of the following, you may get caught soon:

• entertaining at strip clubs and charging this to clients. This is so wrong on so many levels that I can't believe some people still believe it's acceptable behavior.
• staying at luxury hotels even though the client has specified a perfectly good and less expensive 3-4 star property. I knew one prima donna who would only stay in hotels with exquisite French restaurants and were the most expensive properties in that town.
• buying the most expensive meals on the menu and charging these to the client. One short-lived consultant did this and also picked the most expensive after dinner port/brandy whenever we went out with a client. I told him once to cut this out. The second time he did it, I cut him loose.
• flying first class. This one is a really touchy one for me. I've had non-chargeable staff try to justify this to me. It's a hard sell that never works. First class is great if you get there via upgrades, but, to buy these tickets outright and expect another to pay for it is rarely justified.
• renting exotic cars and charging them to clients. I had to tell the executive team of one client that their exotic, expensive company cars were a luxury the company could no longer afford and were creating a morale problem. If my consultants were driving anything as ostentatious as these executives were, I would have been ridiculed.

The seven deadly sins are usually behind many of the worst infractions.

• Lust - I've seen people try to charge in their after-hours wining and dining and expect some third party to pay for the enhancement of their love life.
• Gluttony - How in the world can four people justify a $1,700 meal? I've seen people try it.
• Greed - One enterprising lad tried to charge in two per diems when he crossed the international date line. Not surprisingly, he didn't want to reverse the charge when he came back home.
• Sloth - When lazy consultants or service providers charge people for time that they didn't even work, it's wrong and unethical. One practice particularly galled me. Some staffers got the answers to some self-study training materials. So, they charged in the time like they had done the work but they obviously didn't. Worse for them, I re-tested these folks and they all failed. Then, I fired them for fraud.
• Envy - I've known some partners with a bad imperious streak. They spent more that anyone else because they believed that they were better than everyone else. They weren't.
• Pride - "My clients are used to me charging them $8,000/month in expenses. I can't come in under that!". Yes, you can.
• Wrath - Just because the client treated you badly doesn't give you the right to stick it to them via your expense report.

I hope you're not featured in one of the above. However, if you've seen some egregious behavior, fire off some comments and let's see the depths of service personnel behaviors.