Categories
. Legal ethics

Two updates: Ruff[alo]ed feathers in Georgia & Piercing personal jurisdiction in California

Apologies for the drought in content over the last little bit as I’ve been traveling my state for my Ethics Roadshow doing a three-hour presentation in four cities about what I think the future looks like for those who will still be practicing in 2025.

For today, two updates of note that involve important, ongoing topics but that also involve strikingly different interactions.

I’ve written quite a few posts during 2019 and I’ve had subsequent interactions with lawyers involved in two of those matters. One of the interactions has been cordial and one has not. As with all things in the world, their situations and lives have continued and more has transpired regarding their disputes since I interacted with their stories.

The lawyer taking on whistleblower status in a high-profile dispute with his former law firm that involved litigation on both coasts that I wrote about earlier this year (under the heading “A lawsuit about a lawsuit that touches on everything about 2019?”) has emailed me on a few occasions to update me about the litigation proceedings. His dispute with his former law firm involves very serious allegations being thrown in both directions by the adversarial sides.

Most recently, the California lawsuit that was filed against him by his former firm, after he had filed his own lawsuit against his former firm in New York, appears to have been dismissed/quashed on the basis of a lack of personal jurisdiction.

The New York litigation between the parties is ongoing, however. One piece of the ongoing dispute appears to be over whether the lawyer will be entitled to obtain a copy of the investigative report upon which the firm allegedly relied in deciding to terminate him and whether another sealed litigation matter in New York should be unsealed. Should you be interested, you can read the firm’s opposition to those efforts and the lawyer’s reply to that opposition at the buttons below.

Another post I wrote earlier this year was about a Georgia lawyer who was being disbarred and who provided an example of how difficult it can be in a disciplinary case to plead the Fifth Amendment without being visited with dire consequences for one’s license. She has also corresponded with me, but her interactions with me have involved demanding that I delete my prior post about her disbarment.

Given that my prior writing on her situation relied upon both the Georgia Supreme Court disbarment order and reporting by the ABA Journal online, I’m not concerned about any threats or demands to delete content. What I’ve written is clearly covered by fair report privilege as well as worthy of protection under my state’s anti-SLAPP statute.

But I did want to share a filing she has sent me that she has made with the United States Supreme Court because it raises issues of potential real importance in the world of lawyering and disciplinary defense.

As I wrote back at the time, even though disciplinary proceedings are treated as quasi-criminal, lawyers who plead the Fifth when trying to defend their licenses invariably have such refusal to testify held against them. This particular lawyer is now seeking relief from the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her case and to stay the disbarment, in part, on the basis of arguments over the correct application of In re Ruffalo and other U.S. Supreme Court decisions addressing the impact of asserting the Fifth Amendment on a disciplinary matter.

Her effort to have the Court take her case and overturn the disbarment also raises an issue that I talked about some during my recent Ethics Roadshow, the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in North Carolina State Dental Board v. FTC on the risks for unified bars of potential attacks based on antitrust liability when the majority of the decision-makers are active practicing lawyers.

I would imagine that the likelihood of the Court taking this lawyer’s case up is small, if for no other reason than that statement is true about any effort to get the Supreme Court to hear a case. But the motion seeking stay makes arguments that, if the Court does take the matters up, could make for interesting developments and it makes for interesting reading in terms of how those arguments are constructed as well.

You can read that U.S. Supreme Court motion filing at the button immediately below: