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NEWS > 29 November 2005

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 Article sourced from

Newark Star Ledger - Newark, N
29 November 2005
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Crackdown on ethics sweeps up

Formal charges filed against a record 281
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
BY ROBERT SCHWANEBERG
Star-Ledger Staff
Formal ethics charges were filed against a record number of attorneys last year as the state judiciary cracked down on lawyers who strayed from the profession's rules of conduct, a new report shows.

And while the total number of actions taken against lawyers dropped slightly in 2004, the state Supreme Court tossed about one- third more from the bar.

"Obviously the vast majority of lawyers are not guilty of unethical conduct, even when grievances are filed against them," said David Johnson Jr., director of the state Office of Attorney Ethics. "But there are a small number of attorneys who do commit unethical acts and must be disciplined -- and the system does that."

The state office and ethics committees in each county filed a record 281 formal charges against lawyers in 2004 -- a 43 percent increase from the previous year. The high number of charges were made even though the number of grievances filed by unhappy clients fell 11 percent.

In part, that crackdown came about as ethics investigators cleared through a backlog of cases from 2003, when a record 1,703 grievances were filed by clients, judges, opposing lawyers and others.

Johnson said investigating those grievances to determine which have merit often carries over to the next year. He said the drop in ethics grievances filed by the public last year may simply be a yearly fluctuation following the record high of 2003. The number of grievances had been going up each year since at least 2000.

The New Jersey Supreme Court yanked the licenses of 31 attorneys last year. Halfway through the year, the court announced a new tough policy to crack down on repeat offenders who flout the disciplinary process. Now repeat offenders are disbarred for infractions that would have gotten them suspended.

The court's new policy was announced in the case of Philip L. Kantor, who abandoned his practice and left 10 clients in the lurch. A disciplinary board recommended suspending his law license for six months but the court said that was too lenient and disbarred him, noting Kantor had been disciplined twice before and made no response to the most recent charges.

Applying that doctrine, during the latter part of 2004 the high court disbarred four more repeat ethics offenders who failed to cooperate with disciplinary officials.

John Leubsdorf, who teaches legal ethics at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, called this "an appropriate development."

"I sometimes wonder myself why the disciplinary system takes so long to disbar someone" who repeatedly gets suspended for ethics violations, Leubsdorf said.

Johnson said the series of cases "certainly sends a message to the bar."

According to the report, grossly neglecting clients got more lawyers in trouble than any other cause, followed by misappropriation of client funds. A number of lawyers, including former Essex County Executive James W. Treffinger, were disciplined as a result of their convictions on criminal charges. Treffinger was disbarred.

But the attorney disciplinary system takes a different view than the criminal courts of what constitutes the worst behavior.

The Supreme Court reprimanded Mark E. Magee after he pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated, eluding police and resisting arrest. In contrast, it suspended Vincent J. Milita II for three months for something that might not sound like any kind of offense: talking to his client's co-defendant. The co-defendant had his own lawyer, making it unethical for Milita to contact him directly. It was Milita's third ethics offense.

With 81,617 lawyers in the state, the 1,514 ethics grievances filed last year amounted to one for every 54 lawyers. The 281 formal ethics charges averaged to one for every 290 lawyers.

The court is also allowing a more public ethics complaint process. Until last month, clients who filed ethics complaints against their lawyers were told they could not talk about them. On Oct. 19 the state Supreme Court said that rule is an unconstitutional infringement of free speech and abolished it for any complaints that had not already been resolved.

 

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