Returning to the office from the holiday weekend, I noticed these two sad and weird stories of lawyers doing inexcusable things that seem to have common threads of death and disbarment running through them. Many years ago I wrote a humor column for young lawyers. and you can find some of those columns still floating around the interwebs, like here (starting at p. 12) and here (starting at p. 18). This blog will not stray from its purpose and attempt to be a humor column. I promise. Bleak stories do require some willingness sometimes to attempt to find humor in making serious points. This is one of those times.
The first story involves a variation on a circumstance that many of us have experienced (or at least strongly suspected we might have experienced but were too kind to ever try to investigate lest we be wrong and come out looking like a horrible human being): the opposing counsel who claims an illness or death in the family in order to get out from under some missed deadline or hearing we suspect they just aren’t ready to handle. This now-former attorney has resigned or been disbarred by consent from two states on the basis of having lied in two cases. One case involved the lawyer lying about having been in the ER diagnosed with “double pneumonia” to get a hearing on a summary judgment motion rescheduled. In the other case, the lawyer lied about his mother having died as an explanation offered to avoid sanctions based on missed discovery deadlines. His own billing records showed in the one case that he billed his client for time spent preparing for the hearing on the day of his claimed ER trip. As to the second matter, while I generally agree with Judge John Hodgman that specificity is the soul of narrative, this lawyer likely didn’t help himself with the specificity he used when lying about his mother, who was quite demonstrably still alive, saying she died “in a violent car accident in the state of Colorado” and that the cause of death was “the fire and smoke inhalation from the resulting conflagration.”
The second story involves a now-former DC lawyer who unsuccessfully argued that the death of his aggrieved client during the disciplinary proceedings should prevent the lawyer from being disbarred. The key misconduct in the case was that the lawyer had, while on disability inactive status, taken $1,500 from a police officer for legal services never provided and then refused to return the money to the client. During the many, many years of the proceedings, the lawyer tried to have the charges against him dismissed on five separate occasions. Many of the arguments put more stress on the “criminal” part of the “quasi-criminal” nature of disciplinary proceedings rather than recognizing the importance of “quasi.” The DC lawyer unsuccessfully argued that he had a constitutional right to a speedy trial which was violated by the lengthy proceedings; and that his being suspended during the proceedings mooted the case for disbarment. Most brazen, however, was his argument that the death of the aggrieved client in January 2012 meant that the case against him should be dismissed. For support of that argument, the lawyer relied on cases in which a criminal defendant died during the prosecution of the case against him. These arguments were not wieners (a play on words that only makes sense if you’ve visited the link and learned the lawyer’s name) and the lawyer has been disbarred.