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Scumbag lies

A long term reader sends me a piece from the NYT which includes this line:

ClientEarth, a nonprofit law firm with offices in Brussels,

Law firms are partnerships: in the technical sense there is no profit, ever. Just incomes for the partners.

Who would like to bet that as ClientEarth gets more business, the partners gain more income?

You know, like every other law firm on the planet?

Scumbag liars I call them, scumbags.

11 thoughts on “Scumbag lies”

  1. john b, that still doesn’t stop Tim being correct, that as ClientEarth gets more business, the senior staff gain more income.

  2. @ John B: So presumably the 36 members of staff listed on their website work entirely for free do they? Or are paid a small sum (minimum wage perhaps) to allow them to live very modest lives, but in no way ‘profit’ from their work?

  3. Richard/Jim: like all charity workers, they’ll be paid a wage – not a profit-share like LLP partners. Suggesting that a company stops being not-for-profit because it has employees rather than slaves is a bit silly.

  4. “Suggesting that a company stops being not-for-profit because it has employees rather than slaves is a bit silly.”

    I think it is even more silly to claim that people earning very good money are somehow doing more ethically correct jobs than other people earning the same money because the organisation they work for is called a not for profit

  5. Hard to think what it means to be not-for-profit when all your production is billed individual time. Bill less or pay yourself more are the two ways to do it. An annual bonus plan would do nicely to true up the numbers once the year is over. it doesn’t tell you anything, so it’s on the website just as a gimmick.

  6. John b: so are the lawyers (lets forget the office staff, as I guess its not their fault they are working for an ‘ethical’ business) getting more, less or the same as similar lawyers in purely private businesses?

    The concept is ludicrous anyway. I am self employed. I can ‘pay’ myself whatever I like, such that at the end of the year my business makes no ‘profit’. Am I therefore able to advertise myself as a ‘not for profit’ business?

  7. Unimportant Quibbler

    Every so often a local businessman wrangles a small feature piece in my local paper, warbling on about the new wave of “silver surfers” and how his not-for-profit company (i.e. himself) goes round to retirement flats, old folk’s homes etc, where out of the goodness of his heart he educates the elderly about the internet – how to email and skype and all that other worthy stuff.

    All for a very not-for-profit £50 per hour.

  8. Not to take any position on this, but relatedly:
    Lots of registered charities are essentially methods to pay people enormous salaries (far above what they would get at a real company) while not paying tax. This sort of “charity” is usually a fake charity funded by the government. Same goes for quangos: the people who run them rinse them by paying themselves enormous salaries.

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