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Hello,
Goodbye
That’s the extent
of my nostalgia trip for the days of long ago. Rather, I intend to
look forward to a good 2008 and maintain my optimism. Still, a quick
look back to review the prior year’s activities can be helpful, and
the lawyer disciplinary system is no different in that regard. An
equally quick look ahead should follow. Goodbye
2007: In addition, 21 lawyers
were suspended this past year, and five lawyers were publicly reprimanded
and either placed on probation or had their existing probation extended.
Supreme Court decisions of note included lengthy suspensions for misappropriation
or other trust-account-related misconduct, and shorter suspensions
for patterns of multiple acts of misconduct; these last featured in
particular misrepresentations to clients, courts or the disciplinary
authority. There were also five reinstatement proceedings this year,
with three of the attorneys being reinstated to probation while the
other two attorneys’ petitions were denied. All of the attorneys involved
this past year were seeking reinstatement from suspension; there were
no petitions seeking reinstatement from disbarment as in recent years.
Twenty public matters
were pending at the end of the calendar year, as were ten additional
petitions for reinstatement, one of which is from disbarment.3 Six
of the 20 matters were already set for oral argument before the Supreme
Court as part of their January and February calendars. Another eight
sets of charges of unprofessional conduct are pending before panels
of the Lawyers Board to determine whether probable cause for filing
a public petition exists. The total number of public discipline matters
in 2008 seems headed towards exceeding that of 2007. It had been feared
that the number of complaints received by the Director’s Office was
headed for another sizeable jump this past year. Ultimately that didn’t
occur. A November-December stagnation in
the number of complaints filed meant that the total for the year was
1,226, only one more than in 2006. That 2006 total was an increase
from the approximately 1,150 per year that had been fairly constant
for several previous years. There’s always the fear that a “New Year’s
Resolution” influx of complaints in January will make up for the lower-than-normal
November-December total. That end-of-year
lull in complaints received allowed our office to close more files
than were opened during this final period of 2007, such that the overall
number of files open at the end of 2007 was 500, exactly the target
guideline for open files established by the Lawyers Board. With a
full complement of staff attorneys again in place, it should be possible
to continue to meet this goal. More difficult, however, is maintaining
the office’s other target guideline of having no more than 100 open
files that are more than one year old (from date of opening the investigation
file). When an experienced attorney departs, to be replaced by a less
experienced attorney, the new attorney usually can help keep up with
the new complaints and less serious matters, even while gaining expertise.
Already pending cases are more difficult to reassign and resolve,
and often age to beyond the one-year goal. These target numbers matter
because the Director’s Office is funded by a portion of the annual
lawyer registration fee; if additional resources or staff
prove necessary to handle the office’s workload, all Minnesota
lawyers can be affected. Finally, although
various proposals for changes to either the Rules of Professional
Conduct or Rules on Lawyers Professional Responsibility have been
put forward, and are being studied by the Lawyers Board or MSBA’s
Rules of Professional Conduct Committee, no amendments to the rules
were adopted this past year by the Court. Hello
2008: One technology development
of the new year already is noteworthy. As
many of you already are aware, all of these columns are posted on
the website maintained by the Director’s Office and the Lawyers Board,4
along with articles written by staff attorneys that appear in other
periodicals. They are word-searchable and there is a subject index
with links to the articles. It has long been a goal to revise this
index to more closely match researchers’ needs. That revision recently
has been completed and should be available online by the time this
column is published. The index now has both a completely new subject
matter/topic index and also an index by Rule of Professional Conduct.
As before, all articles that discuss a particular topic or rule are
listed and linked. This has been a major undertaking, but a worthwhile
one. We hope the change will constitute a significant improvement,
and urge interested individuals to try the new indexes and let us
know your views. The Director’s Office
staff continues to balance its educational function, presenting at
Continuing Legal Education seminars and providing advisory opinions,
with its prosecutorial obligation. We look forward in 2008 to protecting
the public while also serving the bar. Notes 2 Citations to the Supreme
Court decisions discussed in this article are not provided. Copies
of all lawyer disciplinary decisions can be found on the Lawyers Board
website using the lawyer public discipline search function. Copies
of the petition for the case and any stipulation for discipline also
are included. www.mncourts.gov/lprb/SearchLawyer.aspx. 3 Not all petitions for reinstatement
result in Court decisions. Some petitions are withdrawn during the
investigation stage in response to concerns raised by the Director’s
Office. 4 The MSBA also archives
past issues of Bench & Bar
of Minnesota at http://www2.mnbar.org/benchandbar/perms/archive_index.htm. MARTIN COLE
is director of the
Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility.
An alumnus of the University of Minnesota and of the University
of Minnesota Law School, he has served the lawyer disciplinary system
for 21 years. |
