Atlanta Injury Law Blog

As a trial attorney handling serious injury and wrongful death cases in  Georgia, I have an intense interest in seeing that my clients are dealt with fairly, that the playing field is relatively level, and that the court system works reasonably well.

Currently there is a proposal in the legislature to impose a sales tax on services, including legal services, as part of a plan to eliminate property taxes for support of education. That proposal arises from deeply held feelings that the tax burden falls unfairly upon property owners. As a homeowner, I share that sentiment every time I receive a property tax bill. But as a parent whose children graduated from excellent public high schools, I know what a bargain that can be compared to private school tuition. Georgia should improve, and not diminish, support for quality public education.

Whatever general revenue measures our legislators may choose to support the quality of public education needed to provide Georgia an economically competitive workforce, it is important to examine the ramifications in detail. Specifically regarding the proposed tax on legal services, our legislators should consider a broad range of potential unintended consequences on our system of justice and the delivery of legal services.

Conflict with duty of confidentiality. Under current enforcement statutes, the Georgia Department of Revenue, under its audit authority, could claim access to detailed client billing records which are confidential under Georgia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6. This could create a serious conflict between lawyers' confidentiality obligations to clients and the requirement to respond to audit requests.

Burden on individuals but not businesses or governments that litigate against them. Individual Georgia citizens would bear the entire burden of the tax as currently proposed, while governments, corporations and insurance companies who litigate against them would be entirely free from the tax. This would make the playing field even more uneven in favor of corporate and governmental litigants and against individual Georgians.

Economic incentive to shift legal services – and law firms’ work, staff and investment – outside Georgia.  A tax on legal services would encourage sophisticated clients, and those in border communities, to use untaxed legal services outside Georgia. It would also create an incentive for Georgia law firms to perform more services outside Georgia, and to shift investment in facilities, staff and support services to other states. Given the ease of gaining admission in many other states by reciprocity, even the smallest firms might find it advantageous to do so. Determining which services are taxable in Georgia would be an administrative nightmare.

Burden on citizens’ constitutional right of access to courts. A tax on legal services would be a burden on the exercise of Georgia citizens’ basic, constitutional right of access to justice and to the courts.

“Misery tax”. The sales tax on legal services as proposed would amount to a “misery tax” levied on individuals and families in Georgia at times of misfortune and vulnerability. It is generally necessity rather than choice that leads Georgians to seek legal assistance in cases involving death, divorce, domestic abuse, end-of-life decisions, injury, accusation of criminal offenses, or bankruptcy.

 Effect on injury cases. Recovery for bodily injury is not taxable under either federal or state income tax laws, as our lawmakers have long recognized that there is no profit when an injured person involuntarily exchanges good health for a specified amount of money. The tax on legal services would erode the injury victim’s recovery for such injury, thereby making it even more difficult – and potentially more expensive – for corporations and insurance companies to reach reasonable compromise settlements. Moreover, an Georgian injured on the job gets no more than $450 per week in workers compensation indemnity benefits. If an attorney is required to obtain the benefits, a 25% attorney fee of $112.50 per week leaves only $337.50 for the injured worker. (The weekly benefit was recently increased to $500 per week for new claims, but you get the idea.)  A tax on legal services would further erode that meager benefit, thus increasing pressure to raise workers compensation benefits, a cost which eventually would be passed on to Georgia businesses.

Experience of other states. Apparently only Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Dakota currently tax legal services. Florida and Massachusetts enacted such taxes, but promptly repealed the measures when they proved to be unpopular and difficult to administer. Several other states, including Maine, Maryland, Ohio, and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia, rejected similar proposals.

Constitutional questions.  There are numerous unresolved questions as to the constitutionality of the proposed tax on legal services, which the State of Georgia might well have to litigate over the next several years, including but not limited to the following:

    •    Access to courts. Would the proposed tax on legal services  impermissibly burden  access to and use of the state or federal courts in violation of Art. 1, § 1, ¶ 9 Ga. Const. of 1983, Article III of the U.S. Constitution and the 5th, 6th and 14th      Amendments to the U.S. Constitution?
    •    Equal protection and due process. Would unequal treatment of individuals and corporations, whereby a tax would be imposed on an individuals party’s access to the courts but no tax would be imposed upon a corporate party in the same litigation, be a violation of the Georgia Constitution under Art. 1, § 1, ¶ II  (equal protection) and under Art. 1, § 1, ¶ I (due process of law), and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
    •    Separation of powers.  Would the proposed tax on legal services constitute an unauthorized regulation of the practice of law by the Legislature in violation of the constitutional guarantee of separation of powers under Art. 1, § 2, ¶ III of the Georgia  Constitution?
    •    Tax on litigation in federal courts may violate U.S.  Constitution Supremacy Clause.  Would the proposed tax on legal services, in connection with litigation before the federal courts, violate the Supremacy Clause contained in Article VI of the U.S.  Constitution?
    •    Breach of confidentiality burdening right to counsel. Would the proposed tax on legal services breach the attorney-client privilege and confidentiality, and thus impermissibly burden the right to counsel under both Art. 1, § 1, ¶ I of the Georgia  Constitution and the 6th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution?
    •    Taxing some professions while exempting others may violate equal protection of law. Would imposing a tax on services performed by the legal, accounting, architectural and other professions, while exempting services rendered by the medical profession, be a violation of equal protection rights under Art. 1, § 1, ¶ II of the Georgia Constitution, and the 14th Amendment to the U.S.  Constitution?
    •    Burden on rights guaranteed in U.S. Constitution. Would the  proposed tax on legal services impermissibly burden the exercise  of rights secured by the 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution?

We should encourage efforts to make our system of taxation more fair and efficient. At the same time, we should be careful to avoid the “law of unintended consequences," which could wreak havoc if a tax on legal services were enacted.

Last month there was a news story about the New Jersey Committee on Attorney Advertising, a panel appointed by the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruling that attorney advertisements that tout listings such as the "Super Lawyers" listings violate professional responsibility rules against ads that compare lawyers’ services or create an "unjustified expectation about results."  That gave me pause, as it did the marketing folks at every big law firm in Atlanta, since the profile on my web site includes listings in the "Super Lawyers" issue of Atlanta Magazine, "Legal Elite" issue of Georgia Trend magazine, and the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers.

However, the Fulton County Daily Report published an article on August 11th reporting an analysis to the effect that,  while Georgia’s ethics rules contain proscriptions against comparative advertisements and ads that create unwarranted expectations, the language in Georgia is more permissive than that found in New Jersey’s ethics rules. The New Jersey rule prohibits as false and misleading any advertisement that "compares the lawyer’s services with other lawyers’ services." Under Rule 7.1(a)(3) of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, the rule against comparisons does not apply if the comparison "can be factually substantiated."

The "Super Lawyers," "Legal Elite," and "Preeminent Lawyers" lists are all based upon periodic surveys of our peers in the legal profession, and cannot be purchased.  While the methodology is certainly not perfect, neither is it meaningless or factually unsubstantiated.  Therefore, we will continue to include those designations on the web site.

And they call some tort cases frivolous!?

In Caincare Inc. v. Ellison, decided 3/15/05 in the Georgia Court of Appeals, a contract for sale of a pharmacy provided liquidated damages if the buyer failed to cease all use of the old store name within six months. An employee programmed the old name in the header generated by a fax machine which continued sending out faxes bearing the old name beyond the six months. When this was called to its attention, the new owner changed the header. However, the seller sued for breach of contract and sought liquidated damages totally unrelated to the scope of the alleged breach.

The Court of Appeals flushed this frivolous case, but was polite enough not to use the phrase that a federal judge employed to describe an insurance company's defense in a disability insurance case: "pure poppycock."

A liquidated damages provision for the misuse of the seller's brand name in a sales agreement for an existing pharmacy was an unenforceable penalty, since the seller never adequately explained how the damages amount was calculated. See the opinion below.

In Fellows v. All Star Inc., decided 3/17/05, the Georgia Court of Appeals held that the non-competition covenant in an employment contract was unreasonable and overbroad when it prohibited the former employees from contacting or soliciting any customer of the employer, no matter where located and no matter whether the employees had had contact with those customers.

The reasonableness of a non-compete clause is determined by applying a three-element test of duration, territorial coverage, and scope of prohibited activity. If not carefully and narrowly drafted, such covenants may well be unenforceable. Broad, overreaching provisions may be effective to intimidate employees, but not enforceable when tested in court.

See the court's opinion below.

In Albany Bone & Joint Clinic PC v. Philip D. Hajek MD, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled on 3/11/05 that a medical clinic's bylaws, which entitled all departing shareholders to the book value of their stock, did not constitute a financial "penalty" on shareholders who left the clinic to work for a competitor. The corporate bylaws of the clinic did not constitute a non-competition covenant of the sort often seen in employment contracts. See the court's opinion below.

A federal court win for the home team was just published at Giddens v.The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, 356 F.Supp.2d 1313(N.D.Ga.,2004) [Westlaw $$$].

We represented a dentist / real estate developer on a disability insurance claim after he had liver failure requiring a liver transplant at the Mayo Clinic. The insurance company took the position that during a long period of inability to work due to undiagnosed illness prior to diagnosis of liver failure, he abandoned both of his occupations, and therefore no longer had an occupation from which to become disabled. We won summary judgment before the Honorable Richard Story, U.S. District Judge in Atlanta.

The case is significant because it established Georgia precedent on (1) admissibility of disability opinions of treating physicians under Daubert despite lack of definitive tests and specialization in disability evaluation, with any deficiency going to weight rather than admissibility; and (2) rejection of insurer's "occupation defense" that insured who was unable to work for extended time due to illness had abandoned occupation and therefore had no occupation from which to become disabled.

The insurer has filed an appeal pending in 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. We hope the appeal produces a published decision affirming Judge Story's order, which other policyholders may use as precedent against The Equitable throughout the United States.

See the published order below:

The McKesson - HBOC merger led to a legal morass due to allegations of accounting irregularies at HBOC. A few months later, McKesson discovered that, due to accounting fraud, HBOC's common stock had been overvalued and that, consequently, McKesson had paid too much for it. McKesson hired a law firm and accounting firm to investigate HBOC accounting practices, and voluntarily provided the audit documents to the SEC and the United States Attorney's Office, both of which were conducting their own investigations of HBOC and McKesson. After a sharp decline in value of McKesson stock, many of McKesson's shareholders, including plaintiffs in this case, who were former shareholders of HBOC, sued McKesson alleging that they had incurred stock losses as a result of the accounting fraud. McKesson filed a counterclaim seeking damages for unjust enrichment on the ground that the HBOC shareholders received more shares of McKesson stock than they were entitled to receive due to the accounting fraud. The trial court granted a motion to compel the production of the audit documents; it denied a motion to dismiss McKesson's unjust enrichment counterclaim.

The Georgia Supreme Court held: (1) the burden of proving a waiver of work-product protection lies on the party asserting the waiver; (2) the evidence supports the conclusion that McKesson waived work-product protection when it provided the audit documents to the SEC, as their confidentiality agreement was not airtight; (3) the former HBOC shareholders were not liable for unjust enrichment, as they were not accountable for the fraudulent acts of HBOC, and McKesson failed to allege that these shareholders controlled HBOC or used the corporate form to defraud McKesson. The mere fact that the shareholders may have received a windfall, in the form of additional shares of McKesson stock, at the time of the merger does not make them liable to McKesson. As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said when it affirmed the dismissal of McKesson's unjust enrichment claim in a related case, "[t]he sanctity of the corporate entity, as well as the policies militating against subjecting individual shareholders of a public company to liability for a merger gone bad, defeat McKesson's effort to turn corporate law inside out." McKesson HBOC v. New York State &c. Fund , 339 F3d 1087, 1093 (9th Cir. 2003). See full text (Fulton County Daily Report, subscription required.), and below:

Company A entered two intellectual property licensing agreements with Company B, but a year later was $3 million behind on payments and unable to pay the debt. Company B agreed to forgive the debt in exchange for software developed by Company A, with a provision that Company B would pay Company A net profits from resale of the software. The contract included a 7-year non-competition and non-solication covenant, but no express provision requiring Company B to market the software. Company B failed to sell the software or generate any royalties, and Company A sued Company B for breach of contract and common law fraud, alleging failure to undertake a good faith effort to market the software. After a long analysis of the law and facts, the Court of Appeals held there was no violation of an implied obligation to market the software, no failure of consideration, and no breach of an implied duty of good faith and fair dealing. See WirelessMD Inc. v. Healthcare.com Corp (Fulton County Daily Report, subscription required). See text of decision below.

In Prime Retail Dev. Inc. v. Marbury Eng'g Co., Case # A04A1275, decided by the Georgia Court of Appeals on 11/19/04, the court held that evidence that the plaintiff chose to close on commercial real estate, which used to be a service station, without reviewing the Phase 1 environmental audit conducted by the defendant supported a jury charge on comparative and contributory negligence.

The contract for purchase of the property included a provision permitting the buyer to conduct an environmental assessment, and to terminate the contract if environmental remediation costs would exceed $100,000. The Buyer paid for a boundary survey and a non-intrusive "Phase I" environmental audit without taking any samples or performing any testing. To make a long story short, it was later determined that there was an abandoned underground storage tank on the property and accompanying petroleum contamination.

In the subsequent litigation, in which the buyer lost at trial, the trial judge instructed the jury on defenses of contributory negligence and comparative negligence, limited to the claims of professional negligence and negligent misrepresentation, and not the contract claims. The buyer's choice to proceed without a more complete environmental assessment was sufficient to support those jury instructions.