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Neenah attorney’s license suspended for 4 months

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//July 7, 2015//

Neenah attorney’s license suspended for 4 months

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//July 7, 2015//

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has suspended an attorney’s license for failing to competently represent a client, as well as lying to and not communicating with that client.

David Winkel, who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, has been licensed to practice law in Wisconsin since 1984. His license is in good standing, according to the Office of Lawyer Regulation and State Bar websites.

Winkel could not immediately be reached Tuesday.

Winkel, who practices in Neenah, was publicly reprimanded in 1998 for failing to competently represent clients, not communicating with them and deceiving them. He was reprimanded again in 2005 for submitting paperwork to the Social Security Administration that misrepresented the time his firm spent on a client’s case.

Tuesday’s discipline stems from a complaint filed by the Office of Lawyer Regulation in August 2012. The OLR alleged Winkel had committed six counts of misconduct involving one of Winkel’s clients, P.L., a Wisconsin prison inmate.

P.L. hired Winkel to represent him in a lawsuit against the prison, claiming that prison officials had delayed treatment of a MRSA infection he had gotten after hurting his leg in the prison yard and that the delay violated his Eighth Amendment rights.

But Winkel, according to court documents, appeared in court but did nothing else for P.L. He never identified unnamed defendants, did not disclose expert witnesses on time and filed a motion to extend a deadline that was already two months past.

When the defendants moved for summary judgment, according to court documents, Winkel was not prepared to respond – he had not made depositions, served demands for discovery or requests for documents. Winkel also filed an objection to the defendants’ request for summary judgment four days after the deadline.

Winkel also did not keep P.L. informed about the case’s progress and did not tell him that the case had been dismissed, according to court documents.

In the decision issued Tuesday, the justices noted that the magistrate judge made special mention of Winkel’s conduct in his order granting the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.

“Plaintiff’s case has been doomed by his failure, through his attorney, to meet several deadlines or to respond properly to defendants,” wrote U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker in the order that the court cited.

The OLR had asked the justices to suspend Winkel’s license for two months, but a court-appointed referee recommended that the justices suspend his license for four months because Winkel had submitted false evidence and made false statements during the disciplinary hearing. The referee also noted that the Winkel had been previously reprimanded for similar behavior.

Justices Pat Roggensack took issue with court adopting the referee’s recommendation in her dissent. She was joined by Justices Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman. Roggensack noted that the referee had recommended a longer suspension because of false statements Winkel had made at the disciplinary hearing but that Winkel never got the chance to defend himself from that charge.

Roggensack also noted that examining an attorney’s previous discipline could prejudice a referee. She wrote that the referee in Winkel’s case relied on his previous discipline to draw conclusions about his truthfulness, but that discipline happened more than a decade ago. Roggensack suggested that state Supreme Court rules chapters 20 and 22 be amended so that past disciplinary history should not be part of prosecution of a new charge, though it can be used to decide sanctions if the charges are proven.

Winkel contended that he should only be publicly reprimanded for the misconduct. He also criticized the referee and offered a number of challenges to the disciplinary process, including how he believed the disciplinary proceeding should have been split so that the merits of the case could be determined separately from the sanctions.

Justice Shirley Abrahamson, in her concurrence with Tuesday’s per curiam opinion, wrote that Winkel’s comments about splitting the disciplinary hearing should be something discussed in her proposed review of the OLR.

However, the justices agreed with the referee and rejected all of Winkel’s arguments for a public reprimand.  The court also ordered Winkel to pay the full cost of the disciplinary proceeding, which was more than $42,600 as of Feb. 25.

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