Note iv-24 — Chapter IV · DOLLARS AND CENTS

Lamon’s Recollections, 17-19; see, also, Browne’s Lincoln and Men, i, 348-51. There are a few other examples, in legal history, of high-minded lawyers rejecting what they regarded as excessive fees. One notable English instance is thus related by Lord Brougham concerning Topping:—

“A general retainer of a thousand guineas was brought to him to cover the Baltic cases then in progress. His answer was, that this indicated either a doubt of his doing his duty on the ordinary terms known in the profession (one guinea particular, and five guineas general retainer)—or an expectation that he should, on being thus retained, do something beyond the line of his duty; and therefore he must decline it. His clerk then accepted of the usual sum of five guineas, and he led on those important cases, for the defendants.”

So also Charles O’Conor, leader for many years of the New York bar, subordinated money-making to a sense of professional propriety. His friend, William H. Winters, Librarian of the Law Institute, relates that a client once urged the famous pleader, with some insistence, to accept a very much larger fee than the lawyer had charged. O’Conor, becoming indignant, manifested in his own forcible way how this annoyed him. He denied the right of any one to dictate what his pay for legal services should be, and dismissed the presumptuous client without ceremony.