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Attorney faces license suspension over misconduct in Minnesota

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//March 8, 2016//

Attorney faces license suspension over misconduct in Minnesota

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//March 8, 2016//

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An attorney who was disciplined in Minnesota for misconduct now faces a 60-day suspension of his Wisconsin law license.

According to an Office of Lawyer Regulation complaint filed Feb. 11, Mark Kurzman, a lawyer out of Minneapolis, failed to notify the OLR that the Minnesota Supreme Court had suspended his license in November. Kurzman had been licensed in Minnesota since 1972. The court reinstated his license to practice on Feb. 18.

The Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision stemmed from misconduct it found that Kurzman committed while his license was already on probation for violations of trust-account rules. Among the accusations were that he had asked a question, without any good reason, essentially accusing a witness of molesting boys, taking months to provide a copy of a client’s file, failing to properly submit documents to a court as ordered and providing client files to another client.

The Minnesota court also noted that Kurzman had a lengthy disciplinary record. He has been disciplined 10 times for violating 19 provisions of Minnesota’s professional rules of attorney conduct, the court noted in its decision.

Kurzman was also privately admonished eight times from 1994 to 2013. He was placed on private probation in 2007 and publicly reprimanded for trust-account violations in 2010 and put on probation for two years.

“The variety of Kurzman’s misconduct and extent of his disciplinary history are unusual and make direct comparisons difficult,” Minnesota’s high court wrote in November.

The OLR is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to suspend Kurzman’s license for 60 days.

Kurzman graduated from the New York University School of Law and has been licensed to practice in Wisconsin since 2003. His license is in good standing, according to the OLR and State Bar of Wisconsin websites. The state Supreme Court publicly reprimanded him in 2012 as reciprocal discipline for trust-account violations that the Minnesota Supreme Court had disciplined him for in 2010.

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