Serious Sanction Warranted

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has imposed a three-year suspension of an attorney who did not place advance fees in escrow and failed to perform services

With respect to the appropriate sanction, the referee noted that this case includes many instances where Attorney D’Arruda accepted monetary payments from clients for legal services he was to render.  In many instances, those initial payments by clients were placed into Attorney D’Arruda’s business account rather than into his trust account.  Attorney D’Arruda repeatedly failed to provide an itemized statement to his clients or otherwise account for the disposition of payments received from his clients.  The referee said that this conduct was similar to that for which Attorney D’Arruda was both privately and publicly reprimanded in the past.  The referee said:

I am most bothered by the fact that in numerous instances, when Attorney D’Arruda knew his license to practice law was going to be temporarily suspended, he continued to accept new cases and payments from new clients, knowing he was about to have his license temporarily suspended.  Without the benefit of an explanation from Attorney D’Arruda, I can only conclude that Attorney D’Arruda knowingly accepted monetary payments from new clients and that he had no intention of fulfilling his duties to represent the clients or return the money once his license was temporarily suspended.  In other words, Attorney D’Arruda intentionally took money from new clients with no intention of providing legal services to them and with no intention of refunding the money paid by these clients.  This is intentional misconduct of a most serious nature.

The court

This case involves 42 counts of misconduct affecting 12 clients.  In all three [comparable] cases, the attorneys failed to comply with clients’ requests for information, failed to explain matters to the extent reasonably necessary to permit clients to make informed decisions regarding the representations, and failed to timely respond to the OLR’s requests for information.  Although Attorney D’Arruda’s prior disciplinary history is not extensive, the misconduct at issue here is very serious and warrants a significant sanction.  We also agree that Attorney D’Arruda should make restitution as recommended by the referee and that he should be required to bear the full costs of this proceeding.

(Mike Frisch)