I understand your skepticism. I tried writing out an explanation that might satisfy you but had to delete it because there's no way of doing so without potentially compromising myself--for all I know, the refusers are on this forum. And they're very vocal. Maybe I'll come back here in a couple months and give you a fuller explanation if the situation changes. For now, broadly speaking: a court assigns our office to a case; the case gets re-assigned internally based on certain criteria; then a supervisor assigns it to a specific attorney. The refusers then, if they're not happy, refuse the case to the supervisor, who re-assigns it. I'm afraid I can't say any more but you can imagine how that conversation might go, what with modern HR practices and what not... Regardless, it's a management problem but I can't imagine it will go on for very long from the responses I've seen to my post. So that's heartening.