Opinion 2127

A temporary lawyer asks whether a proposed contract arrangement in which she will be directly supervised by the hiring lawyer and will bill the hiring lawyer for hours worked, but will be paid only for hours that the hiring lawyer bills to and collects from the client, violates RPC 1.5(e) regarding fee-splitting between lawyers. This situation does not implicate RPC 1.5(e), which by its terms applies to "a division of fee between lawyers." Comment [7] to ABA Model Rule 1.5, which has been proposed for adoption by the WSBA and is now pending before the Washington Supreme Court, defines a division of a fee under the rule as "a single billing to a client covering the fee of two or more lawyers who are not in the same firm." Under the proposed arrangement, the gross fee paid by the client to the hiring lawyer is not shared with the temporary lawyer, so there is no division of a fee implicating RPC 1.5(e). See ABA Formal Ethics Op. 88-356 (where a law firm pays a temporary lawyer reasonable compensation for services performed for the firm and does not charge the payments thereafter to the client as a disbursement, RPC 1.5(e) does not apply “because the gross fee the client pays the firm is not shared with the temporary lawyer”).

Finally, there may be other important ethics issues besides fee-splitting implicated in any temporary lawyer scenario for both the hiring and the temporary lawyers. We have not been asked about those and we are not commenting on them in this informal opinion.

Advisory Opinions are provided for the education of the Bar and reflect the opinion of the Committee on Professional Ethics (CPE) or its predecessors. Advisory Opinions are provided pursuant to the authorization granted by the Board of Governors, but are not individually approved by the Board and do not reflect the official position of the Bar association. Laws other than the Washington State Rules of Professional Conduct may apply to the inquiry. The Committee's answer does not include or opine about any other applicable law other than the meaning of the Rules of Professional Conduct.