Lawyers – professional, upstanding, the highest standards of work ethic… Sex is the last thing one expects to see referred to in a firm’s boilerplate client care letter. Well, such written conditions might just have been avoided but sex still somehow appears to have been slipped into a couple of legal bargains recently.

A case in London saw a client alleging that her lawyer was charging her for having sex with her. Anal Sheikh stated, in a High Court claim for over £750,000, that Marc Beaumont was charging her at the rate of £250 an hour for his ’services’. She asserted that many of their “legal conferences” were rather more passionate than that; and we’re not talking Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men here.  Beaumont categorically denied the claim.

In a slightly more sordid episode across the other side of the wet expanse of the Atlantic, a Florida lawyer has just been disbarred for driving a slightly harder bargain… The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday disbarred James Harvey Tipler for multiple bar infractions, law violations and unethical conduct, including trading sex for attorney fees. “He satisfied his own sexual appetite with a client as a sex-for-fees arrangement,” Chief Justice Peggy Quince wrote. According to an opinion by the Florida Supreme Court, Tipler represented an 18 year-old mother on charges of aggravated assault and charged a flat fee of $2300.  As part of the fee arrangement, Tipler agreed to reduce the balance by $200 every time the client had sex with him, or by $400 every time the client arranged for another woman to have sex with him.

Lawyers screwing people for money? We’re horrified.