Gavel and legal booksQ: The lawyers my boss hired got together with a defense lawyer and started making “concessions” with each other on the cases they were working. To me, that is throwing the case for their own benefit and charging the clients anyway.

The defense lawyer is a lawyer working for free. I also pointed out that the defendant was in default not once, but four times, and my lawyers always made an excuse for her. Should I bring this information before the bar, and could you tell me who to contact in Florida?

A: While the details in your question are quite vague, it does not seem that you are personally involved in litigation, but rather, the company you work for has sued someone for breach of contract. The party that may have a complaint against the attorneys representing your company is the company itself.

If your duties as an employee of that company are to oversee and handle the litigation on behalf of the company, you may have the duty to direct the litigation and oversee the course of action in the case. However, if you are not responsible for the litigation, you may want to discuss your concerns with your boss, but your opinion on the direction of the case may differ from that of the person directing the case.

For you to report any attorney in the case you are observing, you would have to observe misconduct on the part of the attorneys. You should know that it is usually normal for attorneys to try to work out some of the details in the case to avoid prolonging the litigation. The concessions you observed may actually cut the expenses in the litigation.

There are times that attorneys will work together to resolve some of the issues in a case with the ultimate effort to try to resolve the case well ahead of the day in court.

In some litigation cases, the parties will spend much more time and money in fighting issues that are not at the core of the case with ultimate result causing both sides of the fight to have huge legal expenses and no resolution on the core issue.

Before you report the attorneys, you should attempt to understand whether the attorneys are trying to resolve some of the tangential issues in the case to actually minimize expenses in the long run (for both sides) and are trying in good faith to settle the case or whether the attorneys are “conceding” issues in the case for their own self interests and not the interests of the client.

If you find true misconduct in their representation and decide to report the attorneys, your report would go to the attorney disciplinary office of the State of Florida. You can find more information on how to file a complaint and other useful information at www.FloridaBar.com.