BULLETINS FROM ALOHA

A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE OREGON STATE BAR'S DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM  --   I had been gone from Oregon for ten years, but was happy to return.  Serendipity intervened and an old friend offered me a job at his local law firm before my employment quest even began.  At the same time, I began reading the advance sheets and stumbled upon a strange disciplinary case published there.  It seems a lawyer had been found guilty of a minor traffic offense and the major decision to be decided by our stalwart courts was whether the offense constituted "moral turpitude" such that the lawyer should also be found guilty of an ethical lapse.  Weird.  First, it struck me as double jeopardy.  Second, it struck me as asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin. 

Then my own personal odyssey began with the fun and good times at the Oregon State Bar.  You see, I had been a lawyer for a good long time, but had never practiced law on the ground.  I had been counsel to several insurance companies which took me across the United States and now I was returning to the fold.  My good buddy nurtured my rough beginnings in the private practice of law and all was well.  Until that first disciplinary complaint came rolling in.  For the fourteen years in corporate life, I had been called a good many things, but never unethical.  My record was fourteen years of spotlessness in the ethical realm.  This was all to change when I became a lonely private practitioner of the law in Oregon.  Oh, how it was to change.  My ethics haven't changed, but subjugation to a Bar that enjoys retaliation is what is of moment.

Let me fast forward ten years.  About 1997, after about ten years in private practice, I was starting to get weary of these eight month investigations by Mr. Sapiro, our good disciplinary counsel at the Oregon State Bar of "ethical" complaints  either by my clients who didn't want to pay their attorney fee bill or by opposing lawyers as part of their advocacy strategy.  So, one day I asked the Bar to assemble all these spurious bar complaint files and I examined each one to determine what exactly took an average of eight months to determine no ethical violation had occurred.  What I found was disconcerting.  There were no time constraints on the Bar's disciplinary department to do anything!!

The final straw occurred in 2001.  Up until that time I had no formal (meaning that the Bar actually files 'criminal' charges against you) complaints against me.  Mr. Sapiro's department had dismissed two ethical overtures by my opposition in ongoing litigation, but the third would be investigated by him.  After a three year 'investigation' that went nowhere and was assigned to two outside investigators, I had had it.  I filed an ethical complaint against Mr. Sapiro for neglect.  

Well, I don't have to tell you the "rest of the story" do I?  Since 2001 Mr. Sapiro has filed eight (8), that is right, count them......eight more formal disciplinary complaints against me and last year the Oregon Supreme Court, without reading the record, suspended me from the practice of law for an indeterminate time period until I become moral enough to sit on the group W bench.  The shower continues.

Here is my message.  Our illustrious leaders don't care.  The media doesn't care.  (One reporter from the Oregonian told me the public would rather read about Trimet than our justice system).  Our fellow lawyers don't care (all the while opening up their Bulletin to the disciplinary pages then tossing that publication aside).  So, we must do it ourselves.  We must organize.  We must protest.  We must do something about our Bar's Disciplinary Department.   Nobody cares but us.