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High court slaps Beloit attorney with additional 3-1/2 year suspension

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//July 26, 2016//

High court slaps Beloit attorney with additional 3-1/2 year suspension

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//July 26, 2016//

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After the Wisconsin Department of Justice decided not to pursue criminal charges against a Beloit attorney, the state’s high court has chosen to extend the suspension of the lawyer’s license.

Friday’s discipline stems from one of the 31 counts of misconduct Mary Biester had been charged with in a 2012 complaint the OLR filed against her. The high court had suspended Biester’s license in 2013 for one year over 30 of the counts, which ranged from using money held in trust for clients for her bills to failing to return clients’ calls. She was ordered to pay restitution and more than $25,000 in costs to the OLR.

But the discipline did not concern the second count of misconduct in the complaint, because the referee overseeing the case stayed the proceedings for that part of the complaint to see if criminal charges against Biester would be brought. Going forward could thus have violated Biester’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The second count of misconduct concerned allegations that Biester, who had been licensed to practice since 1979, used $78,000 worth of a client’s money held in a trust account to pay the mortgage on Biester’s own home, which was subject to a foreclosure action when the client hired her in 2008.

According to the OLR, Biester had then been expecting to have money troubles, and Biester’s non-lawyer assistant in 2009 persuaded the client that she needed to transfer the money to Biester’s trust account to protect it from her husband. The client wired the money to the account, and Biester then wired the money to the bank that had held the mortgage on her house.

However, the state Department of Justice in March 2015, chose to file criminal charges against the assistant, not Biester. The stay was thus lifted and an additional proceeding involving the misconduct went forward. A referee recommended that Biester’s license be suspended for five years, starting from when the suspension from 2013 went into effect.

However, the justices chose on Friday to suspend Biester’s license for 3-1/2 years, starting from the time the one-year suspension ended, which was in November 2014. The justices noted that their decision from 2013 had called for any additional misconduct to result in consecutive discipline.

The high court noted in its decision Friday that the 3-1/2 year suspension was warranted because Biester, unlike other attorneys with no previous discipline who had converted client money held in trust, continues to blame her former assistant instead of taking responsibility for her actions.

Biester had maintained throughout the proceedings that she had been a victim of fraud and that she did not know that the $78,000 came from her client. The referee in the proceeding, however, didn’t believe her because the amount matched exactly what Biester believed the client had received as an inheritance and Biester was at the bank, where her trust account was being held, when the money was wired to her account. The referee concluded that the assistant and Biester were working together, and the high court found the conclusion reasonable.

The justices on Friday also ordered Biester to pay $78,000 in restitution to the Wisconsin Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection and pay the cost of the proceeding, which was $8,712.86.

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