Not A Ghost Of A Chance
An attorney originally admitted in Nebraska and later disbarred there has been suspended for three years by the Iowa Supreme Court,
The attorney was suspended in Iowa for three years as reciprocal discipline for the Nebraska misconduct. He was concurrently suspended for six months for a misdemeanor tax conviction.
This attorney disciplinary matter presents the curious, but unfortunately not unheard of, circumstance of a lawyer who inexplicably “ghosts” his client in the middle of representation. Clients in these unfortunate situations, often anxious and always confused by the lawyer’s repeated failures to respond, eventually figure out that they’ve been abandoned, but sometimes not before they’ve suffered harm because of the lawyer’s misconduct. This type of behavior, of course, defies our ethics rules that impose clear-cut duties on lawyers to act with diligence, to keep clients reasonably informed, and to respond to clients’ reasonable requests for information about their legal matters.
In this case, the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board charged the lawyer with neglect and other violations of the Iowa Rules of Professional Conduct and recommended an eighteen-month suspension. The grievance commission concluded that the lawyer committed each of the charged violations and recommended that we revoke the lawyer’s license. On review, we find all the same violations of our ethics rules and impose a three-year suspension.
The matter involved a single client but the court concluded
O’Brien also has a significant disciplinary history. As noted earlier, we’ve suspended O’Brien’s license twice in the last twenty years, and he was disbarred in Nebraska. But we also publicly reprimanded him in 2017 for violating rules 32:1.3 and 32:1.4 after he neglected a client’s divorce case (resulting in the case’s dismissal) and then failed to inform his client of the dismissal. That misconduct, of course, bears considerable resemblance to the misconduct in this case. And although private admonitions are not discipline, O’Brien has been privately admonished on at least seven occasions, including for neglect and client communication failures similar to the current case. “[P]rivate admonitions,” as we have said, “put a lawyer on notice of deficiencies regarding ethical requirements.” Parrish, 925 N.W.2d at 166. The nature and measure of O’Brien’s disciplinary history weighs heavy.
O’Brien’s failure to participate in the proceedings leaves us in the dark about mitigating factors to consider, and we have no license to speculate about them. In this respect, certainly, his silence is a potential missed opportunity to advocate for a more lenient sanction.
(Mike Frisch)