Within the past year or two, Tennessee adopted a new rule provision to specifically require the Court to suspend lawyers who have been determined to be in default on their student loans. The Tennessee Bar Association opposed the adoption of this rule for as long as it could but, ultimately, the pressure created by the Legislature (which had passed a bill back in 2012 to demand/encourage/cajole expansion of which professional’s licenses could be suspended for default in the student loan arena) was too much and the rule was adopted.
At the time, the informal rhetoric associated with explaining the need for such a rule was that there were a handful of lawyers in Tennessee with really significant student loan debt that had been in default on it for a high number of years. As a result, many of us were led to believe (or at least strongly hope) that the focus of the rule would be to allow these serious scofflaws to be held accountable.
Yesterday, we learned the identities of the first two lawyers to be suspended on the basis of this authority. Unfortunately, the informal rhetoric about what this rule would be used for does not appear to be aligned with how it is working out. One of the two lawyers has only been had a law license since 2013. The other has been in practice essentially as long as I have, but she was already temporarily suspended for having failed to respond to a disciplinary complaint back in 2014 and facing a pending formal petition for discipline. So, for those of us who viewed this rule as little more than a mean-spirited effort at compounding the financial woes for folks who had themselves stuck under crushing student loan debt, it does appear to be just little more than that. The “little more” apparently being that it can also be used to pile on Tennessee lawyers with independent disciplinary issues.