Liptak, whose got his bags packed, sitting by the door awaiting assumption of Linda Greenhouse’s apartment lease, does his  Sidebar today about immigration law.  This isn’t the immigration law done by corporate lawyer-types to bring in executives and specialists from foreign lands to fill highly technical or top management positions in major corporations.  This is the immigration law of people fleeing poverty and persecution with nothing in their pockets and taking terrible risks to give their children a chance at a decent life.

The highlight of the column isn’t the complaining by the judges of the Second Circuit of the quality of the briefs submitted by immigration lawyers, though there’s certainly plenty of that.  It’s the interview of Frank R. Liu, immigration lawyer.  His candid assessment of his work, and the nature of the work of immigration lawyers, should shame the circuit judges for their disdain.

In April 2006, a three-judge panel of the court warned Mr. Liu that his carelessly written and factually unreliable appellate brief, apparently copied in large part from earlier ones, could subject him to discipline.

You might think that would have gotten Mr. Liu’s attention. But he was chastised five more times in 2007, by panels including eight more judges. In May and again in September, Mr. Liu was referred to the court’s disciplinary committee for his “seriously deficient” work.

Frank Liu certainly sounds like an awfully bad lawyer, doesn’t he?  He’s clearly invoked the wrath of the 2d Circuit, and they haven’t held back on letting him know. 

But Frank Liu isn’t about to duck and cover.  He’s asked, and he answers.

“I think the judge has a point, actually,” he said. “Some attorneys, including myself, do not spend enough time. We’re not trained properly in terms of federal appeals. I ventured into an area I found later was very demanding. I was probably not qualified to do the job.”

“Personally, I feel very ashamed, of course, in being mentioned,” he said.

It is easy to feel superior to lawyers like Mr. Liu and his colleagues, but they are symptoms of a systemic problem rather than its cause. 

Mr. Liu said he typically charged a flat fee of about $2,500 for an appeal, a fortune to clients and a pittance by the standards of large firms, which routinely charge $100,000 and more for an appeal.

“A new immigrant makes like $10 or $8 or $7 an hour, and big firms charge like $250 an hour,” Mr. Liu said, underestimating what big-firm partners charge by a factor of three if not four.

But Mr. Liu said he was not hiding behind the economics of his practice. “There is simply no excuse,” he said. “Even if you don’t charge a lot of money, you have to do your job.”

While our judges, state and federal, decry their poverty, what of the lawyers who toil on behalf of the immigrants? 

Here’s the lowdown:  Immigration is a volume practice in one of the most bizarre pseudo-courts around.  Immigration judges are angry people with big chips on their shoulder, listening to the same complaints, and scams, and whining hour after hour, day after day.  And most of it is in some strange tongue that grates on their nerves.  The Circuit has been hugely critical of the wholesale lack of due process in Immigration Court, where they are just too sick and tired of all these people to care much about it.  If the Circuit judges don’t like it, let them come and sit there for a month and see how they feel.

A lawyer can make a decent living doing immigration work, provided he has the volume necessary to keep those ten dollar bills flowing.  You see, he can’t charge much because they don’t have much.  They are mostly hourly workers, as Frank Liu says, and they have little or no savings.  They often pay weekly, bringing in what’s left after they buy formula and pampers for the kids, and hope it will be enough to make the lawyer happy.  They don’t actually see the lawyer much, but talk to the secretary.  The lawyer is in court, handling the names on his calendar, and can’t be in the office to chat with his clients if he’s going to actually do any work. 

So how much time does he have to spend on each case?  Not much.  But for many immigration lawyers, that isn’t really a big deal.  You hear the same sad stories over and over.  It all blends after a while, the tales of persecution in the old country.  The stories of marriage to an American, who has previously been married to a handful of other new immigrants.  The unfortunate guilty plea that makes a person with a wife and 5 children deportable, even though he’s lived here for 34 years. 

This is an ugly practice.  For most lawyers, it bears absolutely no resemblance to anything we would call the law.  Some immigration lawyers have a system figured out:  Collect as much of the cash as the client can muster, put in the pro forma papers and argument, and if you lose, the client gets deported anyway so there’s nothing to sweat about.  This is decidedly low rent law, and like making knock-off dresses for some box store, they can’t tell the difference anyway.

And then there’s a lawyer like Frank Liu.  The Circuit is all over him because his briefs fall so far below the level they expect from lawyers.

There is, Judge Robert A. Katzmann wrote for a panel of Second Circuit judges in February, a “disturbing pattern of ineffectiveness” at the lower levels of the immigration bar, one that rears its head in the appeals courts with “alarming frequency.”

Two briefs Mr. Liu submitted to the Second Circuit in October 2006 support his self-assessment. They included, for starters, 27 paragraphs that were essentially the same in each brief. Mr. Liu did add a half-dozen paragraphs to each brief to take account of the distinct facts in the two cases, but he made no effort to explain where the lower court judges had gone astray in ruling against his clients.

Yeah, that Liu must be a real stinker, right?  Or perhaps there’s a different problem than the one perceived by the judges of the 2d Circuit, so quick to criticize.  At least a lawyer like Liu pursues appeals to the Circuit on behalf of his clients, though he will never be able to afford the luxury of spending a fraction of the time on a brief that Biglaw firms do when representing major American corporations. 

How many of our Circuit judges enjoyed the lifestyle of a low rent immigration lawyer before they received a presidential appointment?  You see, guys like Frank Liu would never make it onto the radar of a senator, no less a president, and hence are notably underrepresented in the Circuit Courts of Appeal.  They don’t have the slightest clue what the world is like for Frank Liu, or his clients.  The mere fact that Liu tries, within the limits of his skill and time, to help his clients is worthy of their appreciation.

I do not, and am not, excusing bad lawyering in immigration or any practice area.  It is most disturbing, however, that federal judges, the same one rightfully complaining about their lousy pay, have neither tolerance nor understanding that a lawyer like Liu and his brethren in the immigration bar are trying, albeit poorly, to handle the ugliest duckling in the legal pond.  If you don’t like judicial pay, try immigration law pay.  How nice to have wood paneled chambers when these guys work in the legal gutter.  They are trying.  Give them a break.

And Adam, imagine how much better your column would have been if you took the subway over to 26 Federal Plaza and actually saw what life was like in Immigration Court.  No, you probably would have taken a taxi.