Madison lawyer fighting year-long suspension

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A Madison attorney is challenging a referee’s recommendations that her license be suspended for a year and pay thousands in restitution over allegations that she filed either frivolous or meritless cases in federal court.

The recommendations stem from an Office of Lawyer Regulation complaint filed in 2013 against Wendy Alison Nora for three counts of alleged misconduct involving her work in a foreclosure case in which she was a defendant. The OLR later added a fourth count.

Nora has continuously fought the claim, even trying to get Dane County Judge Juan Colas removed from the case by filing a discrimination lawsuit against him in federal court, according to the OLR.

Nora also attempted to fight the claim by suing the Milwaukee-based lawyers David Potteiger and William Foshag and their respective firms, Bass & Moglowsky and Gray & Associates, in federal court for $10 billion in compensatory and punitive damages. Foshag and Potteiger and their firms had represented the banks in her foreclosure case, according to the complaint.

The OLR also alleges Nora continued to litigate the foreclosure of her property by filing a federal lawsuit in a New York bankruptcy court. That suit was directed against the same attorneys and firms, plus 25 other defendants. It was filed even though the case had already been resolved in a Wisconsin court and Nora had already filed a nearly identical case in the Western District of Wisconsin.

The OLR sought a one-year suspension of Nora’s law license.

The referee in the disciplinary case, Lisa Goldman, issued a report on Jan. 13 agreeing with the one-year license suspension and finding that Nora had no legitimate purpose in bringing the lawsuits against Colas, Potteiger and Foshag. Goldman also found the lawsuits were meant to harass.

“Unable to accept her own foreclosure and perhaps, unable to accept her own legal mistakes in that case, she started down a path of pillage and plunder until she achieved the result she sought — owning her home free and clear,” wrote Goldman.

Goldman noted that the lawyers and their firms eventually settled the New York bankruptcy case with Nora.

Goldman also recommended that Nora pay more than $50,000 in restitution to Gray & Associates and Bass & Moglowsky.

Of that amount, $15,898.03 would go to Gray & Associates for fees it paid to the Milwaukee-based Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren and Chicago-based Hinshaw & Culbertson. The money was meant to cover defense work done in the lawsuits Nora had filed against the firm in the Western District of Wisconsin and the New York bankruptcy court.

The remaining $8,494.96 would go to Bass & Moglowsky for its defense against the New York bankruptcy suit.

Nora filed a notice on Feb. 1 that she would be appealing Goldman’s report.

A second disciplinary case against Nora is now underway. A referee’s report is due in that case in May. The dispute stems from a complaint from 2015 in which the OLR alleged that Nora had committed five counts of misconduct involving her representation in both state and federal courts of two clients in foreclosure proceedings. Follow @erikastrebel