THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606230058
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 84 lines
Rare is the attorney who dares to face 1,000 other lawyers and tell them they must mend their ways.
But that's just what L.P. Hornthal Jr. of Elizabeth City did Saturday night when he became the new president of the North Carolina Bar Association at a ceremony in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
``I want to talk about the redemption of our profession,'' Hornthal said in a speech prepared for the ceremony. ``I have been listening to lawyers from all over North Carolina, many of whom - with choked emotion and sometimes tears in their eyes - have shared with me their thoughts about the plight of our great profession in these latter days of the 20th century.
``It is as if all I have read and all that I have heard comes together in one voice . . . anguish at where we find ourselves . . . vilified by a public which mocks us with cruel jokes that sting all the more because they are too close to the mark . . . a public which accuses us of putting greed and self-interest ahead of our clients.''
At 59, Hornthal is the slim, scholarly head of Hornthal, Riley, Ellis & Maland, one of the largest law firms in northeastern North Carolina with offices in Elizabeth City and Nags Head.
For all his aesthetic appearance, Hornthal is known as a tough attorney to tangle with in a courtroom. But on the street, Hornthal is best known as ``Tony'' to judges, jurors, and occasional jailbirds.
Increasingly, Hornthal has discussed with fellow lawyers his concern that the legal profession has lost moral imperatives. It is not always a popular position, but Hornthal's integrity was enough to make him the 102nd president of the Bar Association.
His election came at the Bar Association's annual meeting at the Radisson-Kingston Plantation Saturday in Myrtle Beach. Traditionally, the association alternates meetings between Myrtle Beach and Asheville.
Hornthal aimed most of his blame for the decline in standards of the legal profession on increasing use of hourly billing of clients.
``The very survival of our profession , as we know it, depends upon our putting professional obligations ahead of business and economics,'' he said.
``What we do is a calling, not a business. There is no higher calling, for we are stewards of justice,'' Hornthal said.
``If we continue to hold ourselves out as businesses, we can expect that the public will come to treat us as such, to judge us by the standards of the business world and remove from us the privileges which surround the practice of law,'' said Hornthal.
``In the past 30 years, hourly billings have fueled an economic boom for lawyers.
``At what price? Perhaps at the price of our professional souls.''
Hornthal said he was appointing a Bar Association commission to study alternatives to hourly billing.
``Many . . . studies have detailed the detrimental effects of hourly billing on our profession,'' Hornthal continued. ``When time equals money, we become slaves to the clock; a firm's income grows according to the man-hours devoted to the client's concerns.
``Where productivity is measured by time it is easy to justify one more deposition, one more draft of the contract.
``This arrangement makes lawyers and clients adversaries and the trust and confidence fundamental to the attorney-client relationship goes out the window.
``As a lawyer who has spent over 30 years specializing in trial work, I have a confession to make: I'm afraid that notions of the adversary system not only have come to dominate the daily work of too many lawyers, but they have infected much of daily American life.''
Lawyers are leaving their profession ``in droves'' because they find their work unrewarding or even demeaning, Hornthal said. ``Eleven percent of our Wake County (Raleigh) colleagues responding to a survey recently told us they have considered suicide in the last six months,'' he added. ``The anguish, I think, comes from the appreciation that this sad state of affairs developed on our watch.''
Hornthal is a Tarboro native who graduated from Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina. He was admitted to the state bar in 1963 and is also licensed to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
``Why, then,'' he concluded, ``has the public focused so much anger on lawyers? It is because they have depended on us for one of the highest aspirations of humankind - access to justice.
``They trusted us with justice and they feel we have betrayed them. In regaining that trust we will redeem our profession and, I believe, our nation as well . . .'' by CNB