Milwaukee attorney Boyle-Saxton suspended again

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An embattled Milwaukee attorney will have to prove she has learned from her mistakes before she can get her law license back, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Thursday.

The court suspended Bridget Boyle-Saxton, of Boyle Boyle & Boyle SC, for six months, the threshold at which an attorney will have to petition for reinstatement before he or she can practice again.

It stated that Boyle-Saxton – who also was suspended last year and has two separate disciplinary cases pending – “has strenuously avoided taking responsibility for the bulk of the conduct at issue” and has employed a “blame-shifting strategy” when addressing the allegations against her.

“It is imperative that to resume the practice of law in Wisconsin, [Boyle-Saxton] must show this court that she has taken steps to avoid similar misconduct in the future,” the opinion states.

Boyle-Saxton, reached after the opinion was released, said that “obviously I have to accept the decision,” though she disagreed­­ with the assessment the court made of the case.

The most recent suspension stems from a complaint the Office of Lawyer Regulation filed after two of her clients filed grievances. Boyle-Saxton, according to the opinion, failed to respond to a client she was representing for an appeal of a firearms charge in 2007. That client tried contacting Boyle-Saxton 84 times, and a friend tried multiple other times. But Boyle-Saxton was “consistently unavailable,” according to the opinion.

When the appeal was denied in January 2008, Boyle-Saxton didn’t notify her client, according to court records, and the client found out about the decision six months later, “from an individual within the prison where he resided.”

“There is no justifiable reason … for a client to have to discover the outcome of an important motion or an appeal from someone other than his or her lawyer, months after the relevant court issued its decision,” the opinion states.

In December 2008, Boyle filed a motion to vacate her client’s sentence. That motion was denied the following month, yet she failed to notify her client, claiming that she must have accidentally deleted the decision when it was sent to her email.

In another matter, she was hired to handle matters for a client serving a state prison sentence for burglary and weapons charges and she failed to file any paperwork with any court. She also failed to hold $2,500 paid to her in a client trust account.

The referee who handled this disciplinary case had recommended a four-month suspension, but the court imposed the harsher discipline. It will go into effect Jan. 30.

The opinion demands Boyle-Saxton pay nearly $23,000 to cover the costs of the disciplinary proceedings, as well as $2,500 to the client in the latter case.

Boyle-Saxton also is barred from practicing in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals after she abandoned a client and did not respond to a judge’s order to show cause. The two pending cases against her involve allegations similar to those mentioned in Thursday’s state Supreme Court opinion.

In a previous interview, Boyle-Saxton has attributed many of the recent misconduct charges to severe medical problems she dealt with between 2009 and this year.

She was also privately reprimanded in 2008 for not filing a writ for 11 months, as well as failing to respond to the same client’s calls, emails and letters for more than 20 months. Follow @eheisigWLJ