Divorce fees: when your lawyer becomes your adversary

Just as you may want to know the ingredients in your breakfast cereal, Joanne Pitulla wanted to know what went into her lawyer's decision to charge her a $10,000 fee for handling her divorce. It's called consumers' rights. But the lawyer said he'd rather not say.

That was back in 1981 — six and a half years ago. Today, she's still trying to find out. Her story is a primer on what it's like to take on the establishment.

Central to the controversy is the fact that Illinois law allows a lawyer to get his fee written into a divorce decree. If the client disputes the fee, or wants it itemized, she runs the risk of delaying completion of the divorce, and her lawyer becomes her adversary. It's a strange way to run a court system.

Pitulla sued her husband for divorce in May 1981. Her lawyer was Richard A. Rinella, a prominent Chicago attorney specializing in divorce, and she paid him a $1,500 retainer. When he drew up the proposed decree in September for the judge to sign, Rinella told Pitulla that his fee would be $10,000. She asked for an itemized bill, but he refused, and he told her he wouldn't submit the decree to the judge until he was paid the remaining $8,500. So she paid him.

"What else could I do?" she says. "I wanted the divorce, and I didn't want to wait any longer for it, and I was afraid to take him on."

Two weeks later, the Cook County Circuit Court issued the decree, including a provision for the $10,000 fee.

In November, Pitulla again asked for an itemization, and this time Rinella told her that half of it was for "matrimonial representation" and half was for "tax advice." ("For $5,000, all he did was give me a Xeroxed article on tax implications," she says.) Eventually she complained to the Chicago Bar Association, but Rinella wouldn't agree to submit the dispute to arbitration, so the association said there was nothing they could do.

Then Pitulla complained to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. The commission asked Rinella for the itemization, and he submitted one, claiming that he had worked 41 hours on the case. There was no mention of the tax advice. Pitulla found the statement "really inadequate." For instance, Rinella claimed he spent nine hours on the telephone with her and with her husband's lawyer, but provided no further details; and he said he spent two and a half hours in court, but she contends it was actually only 15 minutes.

The commission ultimately decided to take no action, so Pitulla filed a petition with the circuit court for a hearing on the reasonableness of the fee. Rinella argued that there was a "lack of diligence" — that Pitulla had waited too long to go to court — and Judge John F. Reynolds (subsequently convicted in the Greylord corruption investigation) agreed and dismissed the suit. But that's not all. Rinella also asked for sanctions against Pitulla for filling a "false" petition, and the judge, without making any findings about the truth or falsity of the petition, ordered Pitulla to pay Rinella another $3,500.

(This gets even harder to believe: Pitulla, a middle-aged English teacher, had entered law school while the divorce was pending, and she graduated in 1984. She and her new lawyer say that when they

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asked Judge Reynolds for a continuance so she could attend the Supreme Court ceremony swearing her in as a lawyer, Rinella opposed it. And one of the bills he subsequently submitted to the judge was $150 for time spent opposing it!)

Well, Pitulla appealed to the Illinois Appellate Court and finally got some justice. The court said that a client has a right "to always know what the attorney did or does, and how much time he took to do it"; that it was "obvious that Pitulla diligently and vigorously pursued every reasonable out-of-court method available"; and that the court abused its discretion in imposing sanctions against her.

Rinella failed in an attempt to get the Illinois Supreme Court to review the case, and it went back to circuit court in January 1987 for a hearing on the reasonableness of the fee. Since then, a total of four days of hearings have been held; more were scheduled for last month. And whatever the decision, it seems likely to be taken up on appeal once again.

For the record, Rinella now claims Pitulla didn't ask him for an itemized bill in 1981. She just wanted to know what portion of the fee was tax-deductible, he says. The appellate court opinion has no mention of Rinella making such an argument, but Rinella explains that the court is simply "misguided — they are very confused on a lot of things."

Did he really oppose a continuance on the day Pitulla was admitted to the bar? "I don't remember," he says.

"This whole thing just boggles the mind," says Pitulla. "The bottom line is, if you don't have to prove your fee, you'll do nothing. If he could have proved the fee, why didn't he want to do it?"

She says his petition for sanctions "was to show this upstart — this uppity woman — that 'I'm going to punish you.' "

When it's all over, Pitulla hopes to get a change in the law that provides for the attorney's fee to be written into the divorce decree. "It's a derogation of common law to be able to get a judgment against your own client," she says. "You get your claws into these people. It's like a marriage toll. We're all hurt by it. The system is severely damaged when an attorney can use the judicial process of divorce as an occasion to get a judgment against his client without due process."□

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