Estate of Blythe

The adjustment of attorneys’ accounts and applications for compensation is one of the most delicate and difficult incidents of the office of judge, particularly in the probate department, where so many such applications are made. The attorney is naturally anxious for a fee, which is sometimes resisted with vigor, and sometimes there is no one .to resist, save the court, in the exercise of what it con ceives to be the interest of the estate. In discharging this duty the court is constantly withstood by practitioners who seem to forget, in the pursuit of their private gain, the higher obligations they are under to the law which permits them to practice, and to the court whose officers they are; occasionally an attorney appears who considers (or seems to consider) the court as a convenience for him, and who resents the court’s regulation of his fees as an exercise of arbitrary authority. Such attorneys mistake their vocation or its duties; they have rights which the court is always careful to regard; but they have also duties which are the source of those rights, *112 and which duties the court will endeavor to see are faithfully performed.

Among these duties is that of submitting…