NEW YORK, June 30, 2011 (NYDN) – Jury selection began yesterday in the trial of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s professional-negligence suit against Rita M. Bank of Ain & Bank in Washington. The former Nobel Peace Prize winner, Stiglitz is attempting to gain $1 million at the expense of his former divorce lawyer. Why such an outlandish fee? Stiglitz, who once won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize back in 2001, is claiming that his former lawyer failed to file divorce papers in time to prevent his second wife, Jane Hannaway from claiming part of his $300,000 Nobel Prize Money.
According to court papers the trial will include testimonies by Stiglitz and divorce lawyers from New York and Washington. The trial is scheduled to last 6 days. Stiglitz, 68, who shared the Nobel in 2001, alleges he lost more than $5 million because Bank did not inform him of her loyalties, according to court papers. Bank in turn has denied the allegations, declined to comment, as did Stiglitz, who is scheduled to travel to Beijing this weekend to be sworn in as president of the International Economic Association.
Allegedly Bank never told Stiglitz she had consulted with Hannaway about a potential divorce before he hired her to represent him in August 2000, according to a complaint filed in 2005 in Washington. Stiglitz said in court papers that he repeatedly asked Bank to file divorce papers in Washington in 2000 and 2001 to limit his financial exposure, though this was never done.
Stiglitz claims, had Bank filed the divorce case in a timely manner in Washington or informed him of the legal cost of not accepting the settlement offers, he would have saved “millions of dollars in legal fees, expert fees and future incomes and royalties.”
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This case, as described, is even more remarkable than it may appear. I’ve been practicing family law for thirty years and have represented a lot of people whose distinction is that they didn’t win the Nobel Prize and it’s hard for me to imagine having a practice that was so busy that I could either ignore or forget about client who is a Nobel Laureate.
I am family law specialist in California and I am appalled by what’s become – at least in California – the conventional practice of family law. I have joined with other professionals in the field to write about the cause of expensive and painful divorces. We’ve been writing monographs that describe the tactics, some subtle and some blatant, lawyers use to drive their clients into acrimony. One of the most common is to stir up a little conflict at the outset. (It can be done with a single sentence in an otherwise innocuous letter.) Once the parties are in the ‘ready’ position, angry, and frightened they get lured into the court system with the seductive (and obscenely false) promise that the court will “resolve” the conflict. While they operate within (wholly inadequate) rules of professional conduct, their objective is the generation of fees. To dramatize this abuse we say that the lawyers eat their clients alive in an act of professional cannibalism.
It sounds like Ms. Bank did the opposite of what the cannibals do and look what’s happening! No matter how her case is resolved it will become one more reason for hungry divorce lawyers to provide zealous representation for their client against the person the client continues to have more in common with than anyone else in the world.
Please note my correct email is info@divorcelawyercannibals.com (not infor@…………..)
The key phrase is pay attention. Mistakes can happen, but when you have a multi-million dollar case, it is worth it to put a little more effort into thsat case. Just take the time to stay on top of things. People’s lives depend on what you do as an attorney. It’s not a game!
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