Professor at George Washington University Law School, Brickman wrote a critique of what was then a relatively common, although controversial, practice by attorneys, the use of nonrefundable retainers. "A nonrefundable retainer," he and his co-author wrote, "is an agreement between lawyer and client providing for the payment of part or all of the fee in advance of the lawyer's performance. The payment is designated in the retainer agreement as nonrefundable. The dispute regarding the validity of these agreements usually arises when the client terminates the lawyer's employment without just cause before completions of the tasks and demands return of the unearned part of the advance fee." Brickman and Cunningham argued that such agreements violate the fundamental right of the client freely to discharge the attorney. In 1993, the authors made this argument in an amici curiae brief in the Matter of Cooperman (83 NY2d 465), in which a New York lawyer named Edward M. Cooperman had been warned twice by the Grievance Committee for the Tenth Judicial District against agreements in which the lawyer demanded thousands of dollars in retainers, did little significant work, and declined to return any part of the retainers. The Appellate Division, which heard the grievance proceedings, suspended Cooperman from practice for two years. The New York State Court of Appeals, citing, among other legal authorities, Brickman and Cunningham's work on the highly questionable ethics of nonrefundable retainers, upheld the lower court's decision. Other state courts soon followed their example, despite opposition from some legal scholars and practicing attorneys. One of the latter, criminal defense attorney Scott H. Greenfield, who criticized the Cooperman decision in a 2008 blog, drew attention to Brickman's academic status, opining that the professor "never met a practicing lawyer he didn't hate." Contingent fees and effective hourly rates In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much of Professor Brickman's scholarship, like his critique of nonrefundable retainers, focused on ethical and economic issues associated with lawyers' fees, topics to which he was to return many times in the following decades, including in his 2011 book, Lawyer Barons. Brickman argues that plaintiff attorney fees have increased significantly over the last half-century, especially the contingent fees in class actions and mass torts, imposing substantial transaction costs on the economy, as well as incentives for fraud by attorneys and their clients. Terry Carter wrote of Professor Brickman in a 1997 article in the ABA Journal that