Elizabeth Warren tries to get ahead of her law practice problems with pre-holiday weekend info dump
Warren’s trying to get ahead of two potentially damaging issues and a looming major media investigation.
Elizabeth Warren posted on her campaign website a list of 56 cases on which she worked while employed as a law professor. In some of the cases she acted as legal counsel in a litigation, in others she gave legal advice outside of a court litigation, and in others she was retained as an expert.
Soon after that information dump, the Washington Post ran a story about it, indicating WaPo had been looking into Warren’s legal caseload, While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters during her career as a professor at Ivy League law schools, charging as much as $675 an hour to advise a variety of clients, including people with asbestos disease and a corporation facing possible liability over ruptured breast implants.
Warren’s presidential campaign released a list of 56 cases on her website Wednesday night, revealing a far higher number of cases than Warren (D-Mass.) had previously disclosed and lending detail to an aspect of her career that she rarely discusses in public. The Washington Post had requested a detailed accounting of her outside work and was conducting a review of her work from public records.
When she first ran for the Senate in 2012, Warren came under pressure from her Republican opponent and the news media to discuss her legal work. At the time, she released a list of 13 cases without saying whether it represented a full accounting; at least one other case came to light during the race.
This WaPo coverage has worked to Warren’s great advantage, with her backers on social media — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary communications person Charlotte Clymer – portraying this as an issue either of a lawyer getting paid for her expertise, so no big deal, or the hourly rate being questioned only because Warren’s a woman. The $675 is the perfect distraction for Warren from more serious issues.
This has been, so far, a good move for Warren’s campaign team. But I’m not sure it will last.
The Warren info dump appears to be a direct response to WaPo asking for information about her cases. This is a classic Warren campaign tactic, only release what you think helps you (like the 13 cases in 2012), and then do a preemptive release of more information when you think negative information will come out.
But I’m not sure that’s all that’s concerning the Warren campaign. I know for a fact that another major newspaper has been conducting an investigation into Warren’s legal practice, an investigation that appears to be much more granular and exhaustive than WaPo. Warren must know about that looming investigation, and this information dump just before a holiday weekend was a way of creating a narrative favorable to Warren before the potentially bad news dropped.
What could that bad news look like?
Go back to Legal Insurrection’s coverage from 2012, where I covered Warren’s legal practice in far more depth than anyone else. My research findings became issues in the 2012 Senate campaign. The two key issues were:
First, Warren represented corporate America against the ‘little guys and gals’. Warren represented that her legal work for large corporations was to help individuals. I demonstrated based on court records that in several key cases Warren has misrepresented the nature of her legal work, that in fact she was working against consumers and individuals. See this summary page at ElizabethWarrenWiki.org, Legal Representation of Major Corporations, and these posts here from October and early November 2012:
- Elizabeth Warren issues incomplete list of cases
- Elizabeth Warren represented large utility seeking to liquidate rural electric cooperative
- Elizabeth Warren’s implausible Dow Chemical claim
- Elizabeth Warren held asbestos workers hostage to inter-corporate fight
- Documenting another Elizabeth Warren fib — Fairchild Aircraft case
This is not a narrative favorable to Warren. She made hundreds of thousands of dollars, likely millions, representing the corporate America she routinely demonized once she became a politician. There was nothing inherently wrong with her legal work representing corporate America, there is something wrong with presenting it as something it wasn’t. It’s a question of transparency and honesty, much like her multi-year struggle to explain why she falsely claimed to be Native American for employment purposes.
Second, Warren’s newly disclosed extensive legal practice raises more questions about her lack of a license to practice law in Massachusetts. Warren ran her law practice from her law school office in Cambridge, MA, and represented to various courts and the Texas bar that that office was her office for the practice of law. She did so over the space of almost a decade, handing dozens of cases. But she wasn’t licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.
Many Warren supporters try to confuse the issue by asserting that she always obtained pro hac vice admissions in various courts. That’s comparing apples to oranges. Lawyers need to be admitted to practice in each court in which they appear, but they also need to be licensed in the states in which they establish an office or other systematic and continuous practice of law. Maintaining a law office, and representing to courts that such office is your office for the practice of law, would seem to trigger the requirement for state licensing. [Note added – The restrictions on practicing law without a license were more stringent for the time period in question; this linked standard was a loosening to allow multi-jurisdictional practice of law provided it was not through an office or systematic and continuous practice in the state. Thus, the rule change, which followed the ABA standard, actually is worse for Warren because she didn’t even meet the subsequently adopted relaxed standard.)
The reaction from Warren supporters to this reporting was to blame the messenger (me). I’m already getting some of that on Twitter when I resurfaced the issue, many from accounts that have few followers.
You can review the summary page at ElizabethWarrenWiki.org, Law License Controversy, and these September 2012 posts here:
- Elizabeth Warren’s law license problem
- Massachusetts BBO General Counsel has some explaining to do
- Elizabeth Warren listed Cambridge as “primary practice location” with Texas Bar
- Elizabeth Warren 2002 – Working on at least 10 private legal matters
- Elizabeth Warren represented Massachusetts client in Massachusetts
- Elizabeth Warren defender: “With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak”
- Fed Judge 2002 – Questions why law Prof not licensed in MA provided legal services from MA office
Warren managed to bury the law license issue in 2012, and it has stayed buried until now. Running for president will do that, the level of scrutiny and the media/opposition research is on a completely different level than a Senate campaign.
I appeared on the Howie Carr Show today, and explained it all:
When you view this history, you can understand how Warren wanted to spin her narrative before more negative information came out.
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Comments
“Vice” vice, baby?
So was she ever a member of any bar?
Yes, the Texas Bar while at UT Austin. We know that because her application became an issue for her stipulating Native American ethnicity.
I remember this vividly from back then. It would seem the lack of a law license, while accepting $675 per hour, is some kind of MAJOR violation. Why did she never take the MA bar exam? Cheap? Lazy? Arrogant? Curious minds want to know.
Likely she would have been entitled to reciprocity from the state bar where she was initially licensed. The issue is that she didn’t bothered to comply with the MA bar requirements. You know the attitude of the lefty elite – laws are for little people or do as I say not as I do.
But don’t look for any penalties from the MA Board of Bar Overseers who are chocked full of full-on lefties. This state is quite corrupt.
If I recall correctly, she was first licensed in New Jersey and was admitted by motion in Texas based on the New Jersey admission.
“Y’all must be pretty scared that she’ll beat Trump and actually get stuff done.”
Sorry, I hit that quote and started to laugh.
The reason why DJT has been winning over nominal Democrat voters in droves (hence the irrepressible poll numbers) is precisely because he gets stuff done. He made promises on the campaign trail, and immediately set out to keep them. What really grates on the nerves of Democrat politicians is that he has been implementing the policies they used to say they believed in, and he’s getting much better results than they ever have.
Now I’ll go back and finish the article. Tee hee hee hee hee!
Yea, read that and had a good laugh.
Those people are all nuts.
Laughter is considered a best medicine. Elizabeth Warren continually provides laughs to many. She could charge medical doctor fees for her comedy of goofiness. Her comical followers also provide many laught. Continue on Lie-a-watha and thanks for the laughs.
Fauxcahontas just can’t get the shamelessness stuff just right. Hillary Clinton can do it, Maxine Waters can do it, Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton are past masters at it, but Fauxcahontas cannot quite seal the deal.
I have never understood how those others, except Bill, can get away with it. For example, I would think that the local newspapers would be after Nancy’s head for lying to us for nearly three years about the Russia Collusion BS. She kept saying there was evidence. She lied, and she really was in a position to know better.
So, the San Diego Union-Tribune ignores the real thrust of the Mueller report, and prints a front-page story about her calling Barr a liar.
Warren doesn’t lie any less than they do, she stonewalls, she pretends. She acts like Hillary-in-waiting. She just doesn’t get away with it.
My question is more general. Warren is a lawyer with a practice (albeit the licensing of same is becoming cloudy), she is a professor at a name-brand law school, and she is a US Senator. All three come with some kind of compensation, likely significant.
So how does she continue this triple-dip of holding three jobs, each of which most of us would consider full-time if not more, and of importance to clients, students and the US public? Not that I am any paragon of time management, but I would find it difficult to teach at Harvard and represent the State of Massachusetts in Wash, DC, let alone wedge in the research and documentation required to adequately represent a law client. I would think that someone is not getting what they are paying for.
They are getting exactly what they are paying for, they just aren’t advertising it as such.
She is peddling and they are buying influence.
As a CPA, I deal with attorneys all the time. A billing $675 an hour is very high and only the very best & highly qualified attorneys command a rate that high. Nothing I have seen would indicate that she has any compentancy justifying that rate.
If she is billing and collecting that rate, she isnt providing legal services
Hourly billing rates for attorneys vary considerably by geographic location, but $675/hr is not high for a senior partner in either of the jurisdictions I know. I do wonder how she can command such a billing rate as an unlicensed attorney.
And part of the pro hace vice application process requires the applicant to show his/her good standing in the bar of which he/she is a member. I know I needed records from my bar association to be admitted pro hac vice in another state. So what bar did Warren claim to be a member of when she applied for pro hac vice status in those cases in which she did?
I love this bar…
Especially if it takes down Fauxcahontas.
Knowing her, those ‘fees’ were more likely bribes.
She’s scum.
So what does this tell us?
1) Lizzy likes money A LOT.
2) She isn’t very ethical. I mean, it’s not like the need to be licensed where you practice is a secret. She has to have intentionally ignored that requirement.
3) She’s arrogant enough to think she would get away with flagrantly violating the rules. Of course, up until now, it has worked.
Greedy. Dishonest. Arrogant. Check, check and check. But what have we learned that’s new?
Nothing.
The caption of every document I file with any court has my state bar numbers on it. Doesn’t Warren have to include her bar number, if she is actually appearing of record in any of these 56 cases she is working on?
Dear Irv:
I respectfully disagree. I oppose a mandatory bar for many reasons, so I don’t mind that she didn’t join. What I MIND is her big-government hypocrisy.
She wants BIG government, then she needs to crawl through the muck that all the needless requirements BIG government IMPOSES. She should value OUR time as much as she does her OWN.
Prof: didn’t you just want to retort to that one about where you got your law license with a “I TEACH law you ignorant twit and if you were my student you’d get a fail for not researching your subject adequately in advance of correspondence.”
But then I guess most students getting law degrees these days use them for other purposed than practicing the law.
Being a Clinical Professor of Law, this was issue was a hanging curve ball right down the middle of the plate for you, professor. Nice job. Apparently, The Screech doesn’t know the law governing how law is practiced. Kind of like being a MLB player and not knowing anything about having to be on a ML team roster in order to be allowed to play. Shouldn’t that be a given that everything knows? How hard is it to comply with that rule?
Obviously the answer is: Too hard for Fauxcahontas.
Howie and Professor – a great combo to nail warren.
A note for the professor – find A Howie in Baltimore and start looking into whether Pelosi ‘s POP and bro were racists when they were mayors of Highly segregated Baltimore. And how little Nancy fit in.
Just saying.
Without Howie Carr, we’d be in the dark on most of this miscreant’s behavior (a long list). The Boston Globe provides cover for almost all of them and local news has become a joke.
Re Pelosi’s father and brother–I don’t know to what extent Pelosi’s father and brother were themselves openly racist. But two things are indisputable facts. The first is. that Baltimore while I was student there in the mid 1950s was a fully segregated city. The school system had
just been formally desecrated in the wake of Brown, but restaurants even lunch counters and most movie theaters remained strictly segregated. And there is no question Pelosi’s father and brother were crooks–just check the Baltimore Sun, which in those days was a first-rate newspaper–one of the country’s best.
Warren is constantly blinded by her own hubris. Just like the fake claim of Native American ancestry, she has no sense of her elitism. Just like Hillary and Joe the rules are for small people. For a party that claims to denounce “white privilege”, she personifies.
Paleface made much wampum and still speak with forked tongue.