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.
[iv-25] There is a companion tale current among English lawyers concerning another member of the bar, at an earlier period, who was accused by his fellow barristers of having degraded their order by accepting payment for services in copper. Upon being arraigned for this offense at their Common Hall he defended himself,--so the tradition runs,--with the following plea in confession and avoidance: “I fully admit that I took a fee from him in copper, and not one but several, and not only fees in copper but fees in silver. But I pledge my honor, as a Sergeant, that I never took a single fee from him in silver until I had got all his gold, and that I never took a fee from him in copper until I had got all his silver,--and you don’t call that a degradation of our order.”
[iv-28] E. S. Nadal, in _Scribner’s Magazine_, March, 1906, p. 368.
[iv-30] That baffling question as to how the value of a lawyer’s services should be arrived at was thus stated in Lincoln’s trial brief: “Are or not the _amount_ of _labor_, the _doubtfulness_ and _difficulty_ of the _question_, the _degree_ of _success_ in the _result_, and the _amount_ of pecuniary interest _involved_, not merely in the particular case, but covered by the principle decided, and thereby _secured_ to the client, all proper elements, by the custom of the profession to consider in determining what is a reasonable fee in a given case?”
For an answer that may serve, in part, at least, the reader is referred to an opinion, which had been delivered some years previously by Chief Justice John B. Gibson, of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Discussing the fees earned by an attorney in important litigation, he said: “It is not to be doubted that responsibility, in a confidential employment, is a legitimate subject of compensation, and in proportion to the magnitude of the interests committed to the agents.... A lawyer charged with particular preparations for a lawsuit, is not to be made responsible, or paid, as a porter or a shoemaker.” (Pennsylvania Reports, vii, 545-46.)