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THE LAW FIRM CASH REGISTER

One of the things that has always amused me about my brethren in the legal profession is their limitless ingenuity when it comes to making money. Lawyers write the laws, challenge them, talk their clients into fighting over them, and make money out of encouraging controversy. If you have ever looked at the attorney's fees that a class action settlement generates, you will notice that while a class of plaintiffs gets "compensation" of as little as a few dollars or as much as many thousands, the lawyers who represent them are raking in a third or more of the overall multi-million dollar settlement figures. I marveled a few years ago when I read in the Fulton County Daily Report about a law firm that recovered a few dollars apiece for a class of plaintiffs the lawyers represented against the senders of broadcast faxes and the lawyers pocketed over $90,000.00 in fees. You just gotta love it!

Consider that the the HOA Board has incurred in the neighborhood of $7,000.00 for services rendered through December 30, 2005 by a large national firm with at least one partner, one associate and a paralegal working on the lawsuit against me and lots of overhead to cover each month. As best I can tell, that amount covers the Complaint, some corrective work for a faulty verification filed with the Complaint, and maybe an Answer to my Counterclaim (which, unlike my Answer, was not a pleading required to be filed by the Georgia Civil Practice Act and served no apparent purpose other than to restate the obvious and generate additional fees). I am not sure if Mr. Pontrelli's estimate of the attorney's fees as specified in numbered paragraph 5 of his December 30, 3005 counterproposal to me included the work by Hawkins & Parnell. Now add the Motion served by the HOA on January 10, 2006 and the time involved in preparing for and attending the hearing on that Motion which will be held in the near future. Consider further that the HOA filed the Motion because it does not like the "tongue in cheek" catfish mailbox that I have already offered to remove on more than one occasion upon being provided with the "neighborhood standard" mailbox specifications (my November 14, 2005 letter and part of my final settlement offer that the HOA summarily rejected by way of Mr. Pontrelli's January 10, 2006 letter to me). Can somebody explain to me how this is a good use of the HOA's funds and why this HOA Board should not be accountable for needlessly spending other people's money?

As you should be aware from reading the HOA's Complaint and Motion for Injunction, the HOA is seeking recovery of its attorney's fees from me. It will have to provide evidence of those fees to me and to the Court, and I will keep you apprised of that information as it becomes available. To the extent I am able, I am going to start assigning dollar values to the pleadings filed by both parties in this Action so you can have a better appreciation of what it means to fight for one's principles.

There is no doubt that my pocket book will get hit harder than any single member of the HOA (since each of is responsible for only 1/150th of the total tab to the HOA), and that is the ingenious angle that these law firms and management companies that represent homeowners associations have discovered - people on these boards will spend both their and their neighbors' money freely so long as you can convince them that their failure to take a hard-line approach with a "violator" will lead to more and more abuses and anarchy within the neighborhood. What "violator" with any sense would refuse to knuckle under to the associations demands, as the ultimate downside is the potential expenditure of thousands of dollars in fines and attorney's fees in defending oneself?

The beauty of it from the compensated representative's stand-point is that you always get a new cast of characters every year who are gung-ho about enforcement and who believe that the "covenants must be adhered to at all costs" lest chaos befall the neighborhood. You have built-in controversies to handle for your well-funded client since you can always rest assured that where there are people and rules, there will always be minor infractions of them. Why do anything other than sell fear and loathing and encourage pride, since there is no financial incentive to dole out reasonable advice that would allow parties with legitimate disputes with their associations to settle their differences in a reasonable manner? Couple the foregoing with ever more favorable judgments on the sides of associations run amok from Georgia's appellate courts, and if you play your cards right as one of its trusted advisors, you can turn a homeowners association into a perpetual cash register.

You look at the options presented to me by my neighbors on December 30, 2005 -- $7,000.00 now or the possibility of $70,000.00 later -- and tell me what in the world a fellow is to do under these circumstances other than to forge ahead? As further information regarding these unnecessary fees and expenses become available to you, I challenge you to compare the work product and "bang for the buck".

High Gables Main