Legal News

Should All Lawyer Scoldings Be Public?

By Vanessa O'Connell

One most effective ways to deter bad behavior is to publicly expose those who are caught.

Yet, in most states, lawyers frequently are disciplined behind closed doors, through private admonitions or sanctions, rather than through formal, public censures or fines.

The typical hierarchy of discipline against attorneys goes like this: private reprimand, followed by public reprimand, then suspension, then disbarment, and permanent disbarment.

In some states, fines and admonitions are also part of the routine.

But Rodd Santomauro, the new executive director of HALT, a legal consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., says many states have unofficial policies whereby they won’t publicly sanction a lawyer until he or she has been issued repeated private sanctions.

"There should not be any private reprimands whatsoever when it comes to disciplining attorneys," Santomauro told us earlier this afternoon. "When an attorney is negligent or violates his oath, if the reprimand is private, the legal consumer will never know about it," he said.

The organization next week will release what it describes as a "best practices report" to help prod lawyer discipline agencies around the country to overhaul their systems for holding lawyers accountable. One of the changes it is pushing for is that all state disciplinary agencies should discipline lawyers with formal, serious and public measures.

In 2010, only 15 states disciplined all lawyers out in the open, including Arizona and Washington, it says.  In New Jersey, the Office of Attorney Ethics publicly reprimands wayward attorneys, and includes offenses on attorneys' records even in cases of minor misconduct.

Santomauro used the guts of the report to support his testimony at the State Bar of California’s Governance in the Public Interest Task Force hearing in January. The hearings will continue through May.

In California, the State Bar Court has the authority to impose both public and private reprovals. Click here for a recent report on California’s lawyer-discipline system.

LBers, any thoughts? Is it good to keep minor first and second offenses private or should all lawyer discipline procedures be public?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 04, 2011 (boomark / email).