As I inch ever closer to my 400th blogpost here, today’s offering is something of a companion piece to a post I wrote almost exactly 13 months ago that demonstrates what should be an obvious point, what is a very important point in the world of disciplinary defense but much less obvious, and at least one highly curious one.
This post involves, Sherri Jefferson, a Georgia lawyer who has now been disbarred over what was largely the same sort of conduct that got the Pennsylvania lawyer in trouble who was the subject of that earlier post.
I’ll let the headline from The ABA Journal online article – which is what first caught my eye – explain: “Lawyer disbarred after she’s accused of having romantic involvement with client and hiring detective to spy on him.”
It’s a pretty good headline but it omits, as headlines sometimes must for space reasons, the important thing that happened between romance and spying – the client stopped being a client and started dating another woman. This paragraph of the disbarment order gives the expanded details but still in a pretty succinct fashion:
Jefferson represented an individual from 2008 to 2010 in a custody modification action; during the representation, Jefferson and that individual were romantically involved. This relationship led to the filing of a disciplinary matter against Jefferson, but the matter was subsequently dismissed by this Court in 2014. During the pendency of that disciplinary matter, Jefferson’s former client began dating another woman and, following the dismissal of that matter, Jefferson hired a private investigator to conduct an investigation including surreptitious surveillance of the former client, his son, and the other woman. Additionally, Jefferson falsely disparaged the other woman to the woman’s employer, including making false and misleading statements about the custody proceeding.
The important, and obvious, point here being that bad ethical conduct from lawyers driven by jealousy is not exclusively the province of male lawyers. Jefferson also did not make matters any better for herself thereafter by making a number of provably false statements during criminal proceedings that arose after criminal warrants for stalking and defamation were filed against her.
Jefferson also made a strategic decision in the defense of her disciplinary case that tees up discussion of the other important, but less obvious, point, she pled the Fifth.
Now, sometimes that truly is the best (if not the only) option when the conduct is also potentially criminal conduct, but it almost always has damning consequences on the disciplinary side. The order of disbarment discusses in a couple of footnotes how taking the Fifth justified an adverse inference that the disciplinary allegations were essentially true. (These were relegated to footnotes because, by being uncooperative in certain aspects of the proceedings, Jefferson also was the subject of a sanctions order that essentially acted as a default judgment against her.)
Although much ink has been spilled in the past about what it means for disciplinary cases to be “quasi-criminal” in nature when it comes to Fifth Amendment rights, as a practical matter the “quasi” always does more work in that description than “criminal” does and lawyers who sit in judgment of other lawyers tend not to hesitate to draw negative conclusions about a lawyer who invokes the Fifth Amendment in proceedings about lawyer discipline.
And the final point, injected into the mix purely for the curiosity factor is that she apparently has also attempted to draw parallels to how she has been treated to events occurring on the national stage in a way that, I’m just guessing, probably will not carry the kind of weight she thinks.
That same ABA Journal article concludes with a quote from her – that apparently is made in a filing Jefferson has made to seek to stay and vacate the order of disbarment — “Akin to the Russian probe, this case is marred by abuse of prosecutorial misconduct, abuse of discretion and acts of complete denial of due process.”
Akin to the Russian probe … sigh.