Finnish Bar Association cautions its members for billing practices in connection with economic crime cases

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A supervisory committee of the Finnish Bar Association has cautioned attorney Kai Kotiranta for a failure to specify his court fees in sufficient detail.
      The committee also saw that Kotiranta, who works for Attorneys at law Borenius & Kemppinen Ltd, had acted carelessly in court by presenting statements that contravene the doctrines of criminal law.
      On Monday, the supervisory committee made public its disciplinary rulings, which apply to six attorneys handling white-collar crime cases. Three of the attorneys were penalised by the Finnish Bar Association, while the other three were cleared of any wrongdoing.
      In addition to Kotiranta, the supervisory committee cautioned Ari Kantor and Carita Wallgren-Lindholm, because their bills of expenses were in part inadequately detailed.
      Attorneys Harri Hynninen, Patrik Lindfors and Jan Waselius, on the other hand, had not infringed good legal practice, the committee found.
      All the cases handled related to presented bills of fees and claims for legal expenses in connection with stock exchange fraud cases.
      In none of the cases did the committee comment on the actual charged amounts for legal assistance, though the sums varied between EUR 300,000 and EUR 1,000,000 per case.
     
According to the association, the hefty invoicing did not contravene good legal practice, because the clients had accepted the sums.
      The Finnish Bar Association’s ruling related to the statements and a memo issued by the Deputy Prosecutor General Jorma Kalske and the State Prosecutor Pekka Koponen.
      According to the complaint, the attorneys’ fee claims in connection with some stock market cases were outlandish and unreasonable.
     
Kalske and Koponen also accused the attorneys of unprofessional behaviour, but apart from Kotiranta, this claim did not hold up.
      In the Finnish Bar Association supervisory committee’s view, Kotiranta had “presented judicial argumentation in a way that contravened the accepted doctrines” in connection with the TJ Group stock exchange crime case. This was considered “careless”.
      Kotiranta had interpreted the criminal law carelessly, when he claimed that a representative of the TJ Group had been a private citizen when he acted as the organiser of an issue of shares, the committee noted.
     
On two separate occasions Kotiranta was also found guilty of having failed to provide an itemised account of the time spent on the case. These occasions related to the Satama Interactive and TJ Group court cases, for which Kotiranta billed a total of EUR 680,000.
      Kotiranta commended the committee’s decision on all accounts, except with respect to the claims of him having acted carelessly and against the accepted criminal law practice. In his opinion, in court a defence lawyer has to utilise “all arguments and reasons”.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Lawyers dealing with white collar crime criticised for lack of basic skills (11.1.2008)

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