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Lobbyists and government affairs attorneys can unintentionally get themselves in trouble with the state’s attorney disciplinary commission, and Dentons’ annual legislative conference offered them some cautionary tales to help them avoid trouble.
Dentons law partner Meg Christensen led a training session that outlined two cases in which attorneys were disciplined for not properly maintaining confidentiality or overstepping accepted boundaries for communication.
Christensen noted that attorney James Lockwood received a public reprimand for allowing a client to have access to a Dropbox cloud storage link containing firm materials and client files.
According to court documents, the client Lockwood represented in a protective order case also worked as an unpaid non-attorney assistant for him for several months.
Lockwood also violated another rule when opposing counsel filed a grievance against him and he wrote a letter to them saying he was going to sue for defamation.
“Don’t make threats that are unrelated to the four corners of whatever your dispute is. So if you don’t like that, I file a grievance against you. That’s fine. Take it up with me, but don’t send a letter that says I’m going to sue you,” Christensen said.
Next, Christensen talked about a case in which a client left an online review. While attorneys get many clients from referrals, responding to an online review that they disagree doesn’t end well.
Stanley Wruble III was suspended from the practice of law for 30 days, with the suspension stayed subject to completion of at least 18 months of probation with Judges & Lawyers Assistance Program monitoring.
In Wruble’s case, the attorney represented a client in a matter in St. Joseph County. The parties reached an agreement, and the case was dismissed after the client fulfilled the conditions of the agreement.
The client later left a one-star review of Wruble’s law firm on Google in which the client complained of difficulties communicating with the attorney.
Wruble then made multiple demands, using derogatory and profane language, that the client remove the review.
When the client refused, Wruble posted a public response to the Google review in which he revealed damaging information about the client relating to the subject of the representation.
Christensen went on to discuss more disciplinary cases in the state this year.
The last topic she covered was artificial intelligence. She played a TV news clip on a Colorado attorney who used ChatGPT to do research and cite cases in a brief submitted to the court. It was after he had submitted the document to the court did he realize the description of the cases cited were completely fake.
“I personally would need to read the cases,” Christensen cautioned, “because I’m not going to sign something that a law student or a very inexperienced lawyer writes for me until I’ve checked it and I’ve adopted it and it’s mine.”
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