HOA attorney

Board should always be in contact with the attorney, not the MC. Our attorney asks that the Board approve correspondence by vote first.

Our MC only has contact with our attorney's office about collections.

Read your HOA's contract with the attorney. Often it will permit only one board member to contact the attorney. It usually is the president unless the Board elects some other director to be the contact person.

Our board often can vote to direct our PM to contact the attorney with a question or interpretation of our CC&Rs.

We have a board of seven so you can imagine that it could get pretty hectic if any director could contact the HOA attorney at any time.

This apparent HOA standard of letting only one board member contact the HOA lawyer is not how corporate law works in general. In non-HOA situations the lawyer will take direction from the board but anyone can contact the HOA lawyer. What if the HOA President is stealing: nobody else can contact the HOA lawyer, and the HOA lawyer will take direction only from a thief? And as I’ve stated, if the property manager contacts the lawyer, then attorney-client privilege may be lost.

This is another reason why I consider HOA lawyer to be bottom of the barrel. No reputable lawyer would intentionally allow his or her communications to lose the protection of attorney-client privilege and no reputable lawyer would limit contact with the lawyer’s client. Thus, HOA lawyers who do such things are not reputable. When I battled one in litigation, he and his HOA client got shredded.

I agree with KerryL1's posts to this thread.I figure non-profits with no infrastructure to maintain rarely have disputes that raise people's ire the way HOA non-profits do. Non-profits are not collecting dues from shareholders, after all. I would toss in that the typical non-HOA, non-Condo, non-profit doing charity work typically has people who want to build their reputations on their boards. For profits have money to burn with typically well-experienced corporate board members.

I've dealt with CA attorney contracts. An attorney in CA, their hourly rate is $300-500 per hour. They bill at quarter hour increments, or $100.00. One 15 minute call per month equals $1200.00 year. One 2-hour board meeting equals $800.00, plus travel. Annual meeting the same, another $800.00. That's quite a lot for $500.00?

You've questioned my integrity & honesty in the past on this topic, MarkW. Projection?

In reviewing our contract, I was mistaken: I see, p. 1, "The Association shall be charged Six Hundred Dollars ($600.00) as an annual retainer to be billed in four quarterly payment of One Hundred Fifty Dollars ($150.00) per quarter."

"Retainer Services" include: "ii No charge phone calls with board liaison; iii Attendance at one Annual Meeting and one Board Meeting..."

We pay $250/hr for partner's time; $225/hr for associate's time; $125/hr for law clerks & paralegals. they actually bill at 1/10th hr. increments. The firm is sizable & in classy downtown offices about eight blocks from our HOA.

These service and fees didn't vary much among the 6 firms we interviewed.

Seven years ago, the subject on having an attorney on retainer camp up on this forum. This is one response from a person who was well-respected here.

In my area there are several law firms specializing in HOA law who charge around $50 a month to be "on retainer." For that $50, the HOA can receive advice by phone on virtually any HOA-related topic.

Sounds good, right?

The reality is that most HOA board members have no experience with hiring attorneys and are sitting ducks for these weasels to pick off. The quality of their "free" advice is just what you paid for.

The game these lawyers play is that when the HOA wishes to file suit for non-payment, the lawyers soak the HOA with unbelievable fees. We had one of these law firms who charged us over $150,000 to file suit against 50 delinquent owners to collect about $25,000 in unpaid assessments.

Our development is made up of unimproved large parcels and not one of the delinquent owners lives on their parcel. In fact, the last known address we had for most of them is out-of-state. You cannot obtain a money judgment against a person you cannot find and serve, yet our attorney filed one lawsuit after another collecting his fees in advance for services that he knew he would never render. And of course the board paid and paid and paid.

There were a couple of lawsuits that did get served. One was upon a local woman who failed to pay a $15 late fee because no one ever told her she owed it. To settle the lawsuit against her she had to pay the attorney some $4,000. Had I known of this beforehand, I would have advised her to go to trial. The judge would be unlikely to find in favor of the association as she had paid every amount they had ever billed her for and even if she lost, the judge is required by law to limit the amount of the lawyers fees to a "reasonable" amount. No judge is going to find it reasonable to charge $4,000 to collect $15.00 that the plaintiff never sought before filing a lawsuit.

Another lawsuit that did get served went all the way to foreclosure and the sheriff issued a deed to the property to the association. Too bad there is a superior lien on the property, so the deed will eventually be invalidated. The attorney had already been reprimanded twice by the court of appeals for pursuing similar actions for other associations, so it was not like it should have been news to him that he cannot foreclose when there is a lender's lien on the property.

My advice is to stay away from budget attorneys. They are sharks waiting to prey on the next unsuspecting HOA board.

I comments were directed at attorneys on retainers.

I know of an association that had an attorney/law firm on an annual retainer. Within 18 months, the legal fee was $250K.

My question to anyone, is, IF they had an annual retainer what was their annual legal expense over, say, 5 years? Or was the $500 or $600 all your association paid.

You will inadvertently drive up your HOA's legal expenses. Ask your question through the property manager for an answer at the appropriate time. Otherwise, my bet is the board president will likely (and quietly) request that you be ignored in order to save on unnecessary legal costs.

Agreed. Unfortunately pretty much anyone can get a JD and pass a bar exam. Thus any moron can be an attorney. Somehow HOA boards and non-lawyers give credibility to morons with JDs, when a non-lawyer with sense and integrity would be better for so many things.

If your HOA went a dinkier college and law school than residents in your HOA, you're asking for problems.

Why, MarkW, would anyone think the retainer services were the only services used in a year in a very financially complex twin-tower high rise with equally complex CC&Rs?

In our urban zip code of maybe 40-50 condo buildings, maybe 30 of which are high rises, PMs know one another very well and socialize frequently to share contacts, advice, etc. Our PMs have been extremely helpful in aiding us in evaluating the vendors we interview, including general counsel. If one were a "shark" "budget attorney," our PM would know about it. It's the PM who generally recommends firms to consider in the first place.

Our brand new PM has had 14 years of experience managing 3 high rise HOAs in our zip code. She has very strong contacts and will, I'm certain, be able to rec excellent vendors of all kinds based on experience.

It was a question solely based on your response.

That would be something I agree on.

Agreed.

Anyone who doesn’t know of any morons who become lawyers hasn’t worked with a lot of attorneys.

Am I missing a joke? the main responsibility of elected politicians is reviewing laws, so of course attorneys are common among politicans.

My concern is the high number of business persons serving in Congress:

Table 2. Most Frequently Listed Occupational Categories by Members, 116th Congress [January, 2020]. At the beginning of the 116th Congress:
Occupation Representatives Senators
Public Service/Politics 184 47
Business 183 29
Law 145 47
Education 73 20

See https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45583.pdf

Okay.
I think politicians have a hard job. I think it's almost as hard as serving as a HOA director. Yet they are both necessary jobs. When someone says politicians lie, because she or he did not do what was promised, I think, "No, they are mostly stuck with constant compromise in order to make progress." I think it is awful to be in internal conflict when one knows what the right thing to do is but has to settle for something less.

Compromise went out 30 years ago. What we have is partisanship and the hell with the people.

When I was in business, I had two attorneys I used. One was a gentleman who I used when it was a straight on, all parties agreed type transaction like selling property, agreeing to a contract, etc. The other was a tenacious mad dog I used when fighting insurance claims, governments, etc. He never let go.

My present HOA uses two attorneys. One is a very large company that specializes in HOA's. He is our attorney of record. When it comes to Covenants, Bylaws, R&R's we use him. His firms name/reputation does scare some potential threateners off. Our other attorney is a partner in a small, general law type firm. We use him for warning letters, late dues collections, liens, etc.

There is local ambulance chase lawyer that advertises heavily on TV. I know for a fact he has 20 some odd lawyers working for him and only one of them has ever seen the inside of a courtroom.

AugustinD, thanks for that R45583 link. I hadn't seen one of those in a long time. Very interesting.

Sorry, foot in mouth.

Part of your post was about a client that committed a crime. I have no idea about how criminal law operates in practice. So I have confidence that what you say is correct--not just because you consistently make excellent points, but because I have zero idea about that particular topic.

Per MarkW's question way above, rounded, we paid our GC about $6,000 in both '17 & '18, and $5,200 in '16. The work they did for us was sometimes long (e.g., 6-8 pages) of interpretation of our CC&Rs. We had no legal action during the period.

No HOA member would receive any reply from our & most HOA attorneys, I believe, because the Association, not any individual member, is the client.

We have different firm of collection attorneys for that type of work.

I disagree that attorneys are "smarter" than non-attorneys. The way see it, those with advanced degrees, including waaay advanced degrees in any field, have them because they were highly motivated, for whatever reason, to work hard enough to achieve the degree.

Meanwhile what the heck happened to Janet???