Via the ABA Journal:

A California attorney known as the “tax lady” whose law firm grosses some $25 million a year has been accused by the state attorney general of operating a “heartless scheme” that takes retainers from thousands of clients while doing little or nothing to help them.

In fact, instead of reducing clients’ tax liability to the Internal Revenue Service, Roni Deutch often increases it, states a press release issued by AG Edmund Brown Jr. “She places clients in an endless loop of requests for duplicate documents,” it says, “that increases her fees and, due to further delays in payments to the IRS, increases clients’ IRS fines and penalties.

Meanwhile, Deutch allegedly advertises a success rate grossly in excess of her actual record of cutting clients’ tax bills.

A complaint filed yesterday in Sacramento Circuit Court by the AG’s office seeks an injunction prohibiting further allegedly unfair business practices, including advertising claims that Brown’s office contends are misleading, as well as $33.9 million in restitution and civil penalties, among other potential relief.

Among other claims, the suit contends that Deutch’s office has accepted and refused to refund money for legal work that was never performed.

Although the firm’s legal fees for work performed often exceed the amount of the client’s retainer, these fees are “arbitrary and false,” the suit contends, reflecting a “standardized time value” for specific tasks rather than the actual time spent to perform the work.

“Aside from telephone calls, none of defendants’ employees record the time they spend on client tasks because defendants do not require that employees do so. As a result, when the senior attorney examines a client’s file, the senior attorney can determine what tasks were completed, but has no idea how much time it took to complete any of them,” the complaint states. “Without this crucial information, the senior attorney cannot assign the actual amount oftime these tasks took, and instead assigns a standardized time value for each one.”

Lawyers, doctors and others in the service industry can be more productive and creative if they stop working so much and put away their BlackBerrys, according to a media executive and “serial CEO.”

Manufacturers already focus on “asset integrity”—preserving plants and machinery from damage due to wear and tear, Margaret Heffernan, CEO of five businesses, writes for BNet.com. The professional service industry should do the same by preserving their greatest assets: the minds of their workers, she argues.

“For the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: After about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade,” she writes. “You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: You’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: There isn’t as much mess to clean up.”

Heffernan also argues that multitasking causes distraction, and BlackBerry addicts lose focus and concentration. Businesses that want to improve their employees’ cognition should encourage exercise, one thing shown to help.

Writes Heffernan, “Leaders need to take seriously a century’s evidence that 1) overwork doesn’t make us productive, it makes us stupid, 2) looking away from a problem is often the best way to solve it, and 3) burnout is what happens when people are asked to work in ways that obliterate all other parts of their lives.”