Indigent Services Crisis Noted In Iowa Discipline Case

The Iowa Supreme Court has imposed a 30-day suspension as progressive discipline for an attorney’s missed deadline to file an appeal

This attorney disciplinary matter presents a failure in our attempts at progressive discipline to prevent a lawyer from continuing to miss filing deadlines in appeals. In the underlying termination-of-parental-rights case giving rise to this disciplinary matter, we dismissed a mother’s appeal after her lawyer failed to timely file both a notice of appeal and a petition on appeal. We now suspend the lawyer’s license to practice law for thirty days.

Priors

Most aggravating is Lipski’s history of misconduct. Lipski’s private admonitions in 2018 and 2020, followed by a public reprimand in 2023, all for the same type of misconduct as in this case, give us no reason to believe that our prior reformatory efforts have had the intended effect. As the grievance commission noted, Lipski’s public reprimand was issued about a week before 15 she failed to timely file a valid notice of appeal in Alicia’s case. And we agree with the grievance commission’s observation that Lipski in her testimony struggled to point to specific remedial measures, beyond better attention to calendaring, that she has implemented to prevent the same problems from happening again.

Although we are mindful of the district associate judges’ testimony about the serious need for Lipski’s services in juvenile court cases in the counties where she practices, other considerations—particularly the need to deter future violations and protection of the public—outweigh that concern in this case.

Justice McDonald concurred but noted

Despite our rules, the chief justice’s notice, and the lack of adversarial briefing, the court nonetheless proceeds to analyze the sufficiency of the evidence supporting each of the uncontested violations as if this matter were proceeding as an appeal pursuant to rule 36.22. The court then finds that there was insufficient evidence to find a violation of rule 32:8.4(d) even though Lipski did not contest the violation and even though the Attorney Disciplinary Board was not given the opportunity to brief the issue.

I disagree with this approach to resolving attorney disciplinary matters. 

Oxley, Justice (concurring).

I concur fully in the court’s decision in this case. I write separately to point out that one of the reasons Lipski missed the appellate deadlines is the lack of administrative assistance, and one of the reasons she lacked administrative assistance was the lack of finances, and one of the reasons she lacked finances was the fact that Lipski works almost exclusively as a contract attorney with the public defender’s office taking court-appointed juvenile cases. Lipski is one of only a half dozen contract attorneys in five counties in District 8A and the only one who contracts in all five counties. Two district associate judges testified at the commission hearing about the difficulty in getting enough attorneys to represent the parties in juvenile cases needing court appointments and that they regularly rely on Lipski. As one put it, “[S]he’s important. And she does good work.” That judge attributed the challenges in getting attorneys to accept court appointments to the “reimbursement rate by the State,” especially in the border counties where attorneys can practice in a neighboring state that pays their contract attorneys more money.

None of this excuses Lipski’s conduct in this case or the ramifications to her client, who was denied a merits review of the order terminating her parental rights. But this case does highlight the indigent defense crisis caused by the low pay for contract attorneys in Iowa who can’t even afford the help of an administrative assistant as they work to provide this invaluable service in our rural counties.

Christensen, C.J., and Waterman, J., join this concurrence. (Mike Frisch)