Does your HOA have an HOA Attorney ?

Hello there,
I am wondering if this is a common occurrence. Does your HOA have an attorney on retainer or one that you consult regarding every day HOA matters, possible legal issues and internal issues with owners?

How large is your community?

We're a condo community, less than 20 years old, 74 units, no amenities.

It really depends on many factors for a HOA to have an attorney. A larger HOA may have one versus a smaller HOA. Really a lawyer is just another "Contactor/tool" like an Electrician. A HOA doesn't have a license to practice law so they need to hire an attorney for that resource.

Most of the time you never need an attorney on "retainer". That's just a waste of money. Unless your HOA is involved in a long term lawsuit, no need for that. A HOA ONLY needs a lawyer for filing liens/foreclosure. Maybe writing a legal response, advice, or violation notification. All of which can be "play you pay" type of service.

Keep in mind to be aware of any lawyer that tells you "I will do whatever you tell me to do". That should raise red flags. It's NOT a bad thing in every situation. Just know it's usually code for "There is something else you can do without needing to hire me the lawyer". Plus it could indicate a lawyer that has some scruples...

Why do you think you need a lawyer? Corporations do need them for representing them in court. Otherwise, many services are singular needs.

Many of those you disparage as bottom of the barrel might not agree with your personal assessment.

Our HOA attorney would rip your heart out - legally, of course.

I would, not being trained as a non bottom of the barrel attorney, stand to the side and smile.

Our community also has a HOA law firm on retainer, and dealing with delinquencies takes up a lot of their time. When I was on the board, I worked with them a lot since I was treasurer. Once a year, I'd meet with him and review all the cases (and we had A LOT at the time) and came up with a general strategy. From there all I had to do was check the monthly financial report to see what was going on. There were some things are ask them to do automatically, which saved time on calling for this or that.

I think the primary businesspeople make with HOW attorney is that they call about EVERYTHING. They'll answer your questions, but you'll get billed for it and those costs can add up. A lot of time and money can be saved by reading your documents half the time and using common sense the rest of the time.

Not every issue in HOA land will be addressed in a state of local, and there are very few if any HOA laws on a federal level. This is where common sense, consistency and fairness, and a dash of creative thinking come into play. Start with educating the community on the documents, be transparent in what the board is doing. Being up once in a while and listen to the homeowners - everyone has something valid to say. Don't be afraid to think outside the box or to say no. Sometimes that IS the answer.

Not surprising.

A genius by your own admission.

Why do I hear The Osmonds singing "One Bad Apple"...?

HOA attorneys, and attorneys in general, are like any other profession. You get excellent ones, you get real stinkers, and you get everything in between. Condemning a whole group based on the behavior of one of them, or even some of them, will simply blind you to what's actually going on.

Frankly, if I were going to award my "2020 Cathy's Bottom of the Barrel Award" to any group, it would be to ambulance chasers or to the pet lawyers owned by career criminals. Who may actually be very skilled, just ethically challenged. But ethics counts for a lot in Cathy's World.

But to get back to HOA attorneys, ours will proactively tell us if they think we'd be wasting our money pursuing something. And we listen because that kind of advice is part of what we're paying them for. Aside from education, we use ours most frequently for debt collection activities and answering general operating questions (the latter of which is free). If more board members had attorneys to advise them and keep them on the sunny side of the law, I expect we'd hear fewer complaints about incompetent or "evil" HOAs.

MelissaP1 is correct, again.

CathyA3, my point is just that if you look to hire a "HOA lawyer", someone who specializes in the field of HOA law may not be among the best and brightest of the legal profession. In case a HOA, represented by a "HOA lawyer", has a legal run-in with an individual or a business who is represented by a lawyer who doesn't specialize in "HOA law", the other lawyer has a pretty good chance of being sharper than the "HOA lawyer". A legal battle is a paper war, and you need the best army: the sharpest lawyer you can get, and in a battle of a "HOA lawyer" versus another type of lawyer, the other lawyer is often better.

When I sued my HOA, my counsel looked up the "HOA lawyer" online and laughed hysterically. My counsel couldn't believe that there was a group of lawyers that specialized in "HOA law"; my counsel and I (I'm also a lawyer) were appalled by the poor quality of the "HOA lawyer's" legal work, and other lawyers in the community who I showed examples of the "HOA lawyer's" work to responded that they were appalled by the "HOA lawyer's" "brazen ethics violations". Those examples of misconduct put the HOA at risk. And that "HOA lawyer" was allegedly the best in town. No wonder that the "HOA lawyer" didn't prevail in a lawsuit, alleging violations of HOA laws, where the "HOA lawyer" himself was the defendant.

We are an association of 72 homes. We tried hiring a Community Association lawyer several years ago using a retainer. When the legal costs got very high, we looked at hiring a Property Manager. He has a real estate license and knows when to refer us to an attorney. The cost was considerably less.

When I was Board President, under the retainer we were able to get training for our Board members which was invaluable. However, we chose not to renew the retainer agreement and paid on an as needed basis. Then we determined our best bang for the buck was a Property Manager. You will need to vet a PM to make sure they have enough experience to handle most situations.

Given some of the threads we've had recently about incompetent or dishonest PMs attempting to direct the board's decisions, I'm surprised at this.

In our case the attorney's retainer is $600 per year. We avoid mistakes that could lead to legal wrangling by using the phone calls that are covered by the retainer. The things that we need to pay for would have been paid for regardless of whether the attorneys are on retainer or not. I understand that it can be easy to make use of the lawyer when it's not necessary and drive up legal costs - but that's a failure of discipline, not a failure of the process, and can be avoided.

And given my experience with realtors - I work for a new home builder - a real estate license is no guarantee that the person has a clue about how HOAs and COAs work, no way, no how. The idea of a PM, no matter how knowledgeable, deciding when it's time to call in the legal muscle gives me the heebie-jeebies. And if I were a PM, I would refuse to take on this responsibility even if I believed that I know more than the boards that I'm working with. Liability, don't ya know.

CathyA3, respectfully, you get what you pay for, including when paying for a legal work.

Sounds like you're getting at least a few hours of legal work per year for $600.

$600 is less than an hour of legal work from a typical well-credentialed and experienced lawyer, and it's about 30 minutes of legal work from a highly-credentialed and seasoned partner at a highly sophisticated law firm.

You're not getting top-flight legal advice at that price. That's why I say, based on my experience, that a typical HOA lawyer isn't the best.

KerryL1, as I've stated to you before, I've had experiences with MULTIPLE HOA lawyers. My experiences with them are consistent:

* Another one included various requirements in his engagement letter that were violations of the state bar's ethics rules.
* Another one didn't return calls/emails for MONTHS.

None of my Ivy League law school classmates are HOA lawyers. No Supreme Court justice was ever a HOA lawyer. That indicates the quality, in addition to my admittedly non-scientific observations.

The only reputable pure HOA lawyer is one in NYC who went to Cornell. He's very sharp and very good.

Otherwise, there is one reputable law firm on Wall Street whose lawyers handle HOA work, but those other law firms' practices are real estate lawyers who also do some work for HOAs.

And the HOAs that these people cover are generally co-operatives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

A pure "HOA lawyer" otherwise is simply someone who couldn't get a job in a higher-paying practice, due to lack of quality educational credentials.

Nope. Mine’s in the USNews top 5.

The gender of someone has nothing to do with my position: that HOA lawyers are lower-quality than lawyers in many other specialties.

You can analyze HOA lawyers in as many objective ways as you want: rankings of their schools; pay; LSAT scores; bar exam scores; etc. They will fare worse in all of those measures than, say, First Amendment or appellate litigation lawyers. And it doesn’t take even a community college degree to see that.

Given the number of times you blunder with regard to HOA and condo law here, I do not know how you can post the above and be taken seriously. Your leading blunder is advising anyone from any state to file a derivative suit. But the rules for derivative suits vary a great deal from state to state. It is no where near close to being one size fits all. It appears to me that you do not bother to do any of the HOA/condo law research you claim above is so easy. If you are an attorney, it should be even easier.

Augustin, yes, I make lots of mistakes.

But I generally include caveats ("this is my experience in my state--yours may differ").

And nobody in his right mind would spend the same amount of time researching anything before posting with the same care and attention as he would do at work. Nobody has time for that.

This is still funny.

PaulJ6 is not going to listen to others. It is simply a serious personal flaw.

I’m thinking most feel he is likely a perfect match to the usual gross caricature of an attorney.

All I can say, with absolute certainty, is that I don’t like him or his posts.

It is still funny, though to hear about pompous Ivy League attorneys.

KerryL1, I make lots of mistakes and am highly flawed. HOA lawyers can be measured objectively. My point is that by a range of objective measures, they’re low-grade and a HOA is best served by getting a real lawyer for legal needs.

Gender has nothing to do with my position and so I’m going to ignore your attempts to make this into a man vs. woman issue. It’s not: it’s “competent vs. incompetent”, or “professional vs. unprofessional”. And the incompetent and unethical HOA lawyers I have dealt with are all white men so your attempts fail there, too.

Then I think it's fair to say it is not such easy law, is it? Even for someone who graduated from a U. S. News Top 5 law school.

Also I would not characterize HOA/condo case law as "not extensive." For one, much HOA law revolves around covenants. Covenant case law dates to the mid-1800s. HOA/condo case law typically contains the usual massive citation of precedent. You may as well state that the law of real estate is not extensive.

If you did this with any consistency, then I would not be calling you out today for often posting substantively incorrect legal information. Worse, your frequent posts stating you are an attorney mislead people into thinking you know condo/hoa law.

If you are not going to make an effort to get the law right, then appealing to your seeming authority as an attorney does not seem helpful to readers.
I am sure attorneys graduating from a Top 5 law school would never volunteer their expertise the way many here (who are well-versed in condo/hoa attorney) do. Instead, they would say what you posted: Show me the money.

You left out the part where you paid, what, north of $30,000 for your victory?

I think you are over-generalizing based on your experience with one condo attorney.

Nicole, for condos having more than say about 25 units, I believe having a HOA attorney on retainer is common. I also think having a second attorney, retained strictly to address debt collection from delinquent HOA/condo members, is common.

it is one thing to sling mud from the cheap seats,but can you tell our audience where he is wrong?

What I thought

AugustinD, I consider you a friend and am not interested in arguing with you.

My experience with HOA lawyers is with SEVERAL HOA lawyers:

1. One whose engagement letter contained provisions that violated state bar ethics rules.
2. The one I sued.
3. Another who took a retainer and then quit responding.

And there are more, come to think of it:

4. The lawyer who sits on my former HOA's board and who let the HOA illegally audio record people in the building.

They consistently do not show the professionalism, quality or ethics of reputable lawyers.

I stand by my statement that HOA law is relatively easy. My knowledge of HOA law is from my lawsuit; maybe 3 hours of reviewing statutes and governing documents. You correctly point out that I make mistakes, as I freely admit, but that review, and typing up a complaint (while sitting in a lounge having a drink) was enough to prevail against a HOA lawyer who was allegedly the "best in town" in a lawsuit based on violations of HOA law, so that should count for something. And the fact that I'm able to post anything of any worth about HOA law based on that limited research shows that it's easy.

I respect you and your posts; perhaps it gets tiresome reading mine, but my respect for you will continue.

Mark, your posts are great.

One of the founding partners of the law firm we use likes to tell this story:

Members of his law school class get together in December each year for a holiday dinner. It's tradition for them to go around the table and let everyone to report on what they've been up to during the previous months. There is plenty of talk about corporate mergers, foreign banking intrigue, big bucks lawsuits, and the like. But it never fails: when it's his turn the "master of ceremonies" at the other end of the table will look at him and yell "Hey, Jonesy, got any good dog poop stories for us?"

He is hugely amused by others' opinions about what he's doing with his law degree. On the other hand, he had enough business savvy in addition to his law smarts to recognize a growing niche market that could be profitably served by an alert individual such as himself, and to head up a successful and growing firm. He recognizes the snobbery displayed by some in his profession, and he just laughs about it.

Some additional folksy wisdom:

Expensive seeds do not a thriving garden make. They need to fall onto fertile soil, either natural or amended, and receive ongoing appropriate care. Without these last two things, you have pricey bird food.

Very nice finish, Cathy, I like your HOA attorney's story. It's also important to note that, at least in CA, it's HOA attorneys, often, who handle construction defect litigation. This means they must know this aspect of CA law along with many other matters (SOLs, construction products; standards of care for various trades, etc) We collected over $5m. in our defect settlement with the developer. Neighboring high rises settled for $15m & $26m.

Paul accuses me of being "fact-free." I clearly wrote, however: "Starting at about #8, we see public universities. And some Ivies are notably missing in the top 15..." I'd think a grad form a top 5 Ivy would have better reading skills. It seems to me that the top 5-15 law schools have sought after graduates.

My MD example simply tries to show that folks enter low status specializations (and occupations) for a variety of reasons which have nothing to do with their abilities, intelligence, desire to achieve, etc. I said nothing about "white men"???

After all these months of bad-mouthing HOA attorneys, Paul NOW tells us an HOA attorney was on the board of his past HOA? Why did he wait so long?

Our last Board had two attorney on it--one, a female, had specialized in employment law and I don't know the other's specialization. On his candidate statement, he claimed a lot of background in CA HOA law. But I served with hi; he knew very little. The two of them were a close team and made a mess of our Board. The male attorney was badly defeated in the annual election along with two of his cronies (a PhD economist and a community college prof). The female attorney resigned a month later.

Mya seem odd, but these re the only two attorneys I've ever worked with or have known personally in my whole life. Must say, my impression is vey negative. But I do not generalize to all attorneys.

MarkW did not manage high rises or even properties in a downtown setting--he was in a suburban area of SoCal. Just because he never knew an HOA with an attorney on retainer, doesn't mean he knows anything about urban high rises in big cities such as mine.