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Love this: Due to “inability to pay fees”, Mackey took payment in another form. Classy lawyer!
a barnes lawyer, or other large firm get disciplined? yea, like that is going to happen.
Didn’t know your last name gets cut off. Mine’s Moreau. What’s yours, Richard S? Snake?
So a commenter on a news article is the “snake” here? Gosh, thanks for this lawyerly perspective. Freud surely would approve of your word selection.
I don’t know the facts of Mr. Mackey’s case, so I wouldn’t offer an opinion on it.
I would like to offer an opinion on G. Douglas A’s comment though. His instincts regarding big firm attorney discipline is not without foundation. I remember doing a several year study of disciplinary cases and finding that close to 99% of the disciplinary cases involved smaller firm attorneys and sole practitioners. (I used the IBJ’s list of large law firms as my guide.)
My experience is that te politically connected, large firm attorneys seemed to get away with a lot of things that a small firm attorney or sole practitioner would not dare try. Of those law firm attorneys pushing the ethical envelope, it seemed to me that the worst by far were some of the attorneys at Barnes & Thornburg. Even attorneys from the other big firms, such as then Ice Miller and then Baker & Daniels complained to me about B&T, particularly with regard to strictly not adhering to conflicts of interest rules. One of the most flagrant example is when B&T represented the State of Indiana against IBM in the Medicaid privatization fiasco, while also representing one of IBM’s major subcontractors, ACS, which should have been a co-defendant in the case. B&T claimed that the conflict had been waived and they had built a “Chinese Wall” at the firm between the attorneys representing both of the clients. First, under the rules it’s a nonwaivable conflict. And second, there is no such thing in the disciplinary rules as erecting a “Chinese Wall” at a law firm to avoid a conflict of interest.
I am frankly a bit shocked at the Commission pursuing Mackey, a B&T attorney. I can tell you though that most smaller firm attorneys and sole practitioners though would not have had the resources to fight back against the Commission. Faced with the unlimited resources of the Commission, they would have had to settle for some sort of discipline. I remember when the Commission came against me for writing a private email to another attorney criticizing a judge in a probate case, and getting a couple minor facts wrong in the email. (The Commission didn’t start coming after me until months later when I wrote critically about the Commission and its leader on my blog. That is when I reported on the results of my study.) According to the Commission’s filings, it appears it incurred more of an expense going after me, a critic of the Commission, than another case that year in which an attorney was accused of stealing millions from his clients. Priorities?
All that though is water under the bridge. What the Indiana Supreme Court needs to do NOW is to install new leadership at the Commission, do a thoughtful and thorough study of the disciplinary process, and make long overdue reforms that attorneys have been clamoring for for years. It’s no secret that the attorney disciplinary process in Indiana has been broken for a long, long time.
The highly principled legal “profession” taking care of their own.