From the Young Lawyers Section President

• Jurisdiction: Kansas,United States
• Citation: Vol. 91 No. 1 Pg. 08
• Pages: 08
• Publication year: 2022

From the Young Lawyers Section PresidentNo. 91 J. Kan. Bar Assn 1, 08 (2022)Kansas Bar JournalFebruary, 2022

January 2022

There Is a Massive Hole in Our Legal System, and No One Wants to Talk About It

By Rick Davis

It is a Tuesday afternoon and you are sitting in your office when you get a call from a potential client. The caller advises that he or she hired a contractor to remodel a kitchen and, after doing about half the work - poorly, the contractor left with the money. The caller then emails you photos that show that the work appears to have been done by a grade-schooler and copies of the canceled checks for the payments. The caller also happens to be a pillar in the community with an outstanding reputation for honesty and integrity.

It sounds like a great case, right? Well, it does until you ask the next question: How much has the caller paid the contractor? The caller replies, "We paid a $10,000 deposit and then the contractor said he needed another $2,000 for materials, so we're all in for about $12,000."

At this point, you are stuck with two options. Option one is to advise the client that, unfortunately, you cannot take the case. Option two is to take the case and likely either end up doing a lot of work for free (something I did early in my career) or billing the client a significant portion or more of the total potential recovery (something I see too often).

This is the gap that we need to acknowledge and address - the cases that exceed the scope of small claims...