Report: High court disciplines fewer lawyers

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Fewer lawyers were disciplined in the state’s most recent fiscal year and grievances were less common than in the year before, even as the allegations that state regulators were most likely to hear about continued to involve attorneys practicing family and criminal law.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disciplined 37 attorneys during the OLR’s latest full fiscal year, which ran from July 1, 2016 to June 30. That amounted to about a tenth of a percent of the state’s 25,255 lawyers, according to the OLR’s most recent annual report. The court had disciplined 42 attorneys the year before and 58 attorneys the year before that. The annual discipline number hasn’t been below 40 since the state’s 2010-2011 fiscal year.

More than half of the grievances filed with the OLR were about lawyers specializing in two specific areas of practice: criminal law and family law. More than 38 percent of the grievances the OLR received involved criminal-law matters and 23 percent involved family-law matters, according to the report.

Although grievances can be filed by anybody, most come from clients. In the state’s 2016-17 fiscal year, more than 52 percent of the grievances that were filed came from clients. As for the specific subject of the grievances, the most common allegations were lack of communication, improper advocacy, lack of diligence and trouble with the scope of representation.

Keith Sellen, director of OLR, said these sorts of grievances concerning family and criminal law have made up the majority of the complaints that his office has been receiving year after year. He says that he is hoping that a study initiated by the OLR’s Board of Administrative Oversight will help his office learn why this continues to be the case.

Sellen said the explanation is likely somewhat obvious. Both areas of law tend to have clients with very high expectations and lawyers who are subject to stressful conditions.

“It takes a special kind of attorney to do those kinds of work,” he said.

The board, which consists of 12 members, including eight lawyers and four nonlawyers appointed by the high court, is charged with  proposing rules, informing the public and lawyers about the lawyer-regulation system and monitoring the perception, effectiveness and fairness of the system.

The board has asked two law professors to go over several years of OLR data concerning grievances filed against criminal-law and family-law practitioners. When a final report is made, a specially assigned committee will recommend improvements. The two professors heading up the work – Leslie Levin of the University of Connecticut School of Law and Susan Fortney of Texas A&M University School of Law – are both experts in lawyer ethics.

“We want to see how we can improve the system and also help lawyers perform better,” Sellen said.

The latest report on disciplinary measures is notable, Sellen said, because it shows that the OLR has improved its processing times. Those times are in fact the best the offices has had  in 20 years.

In the state’s 2016-17 fiscal year, the time it took to process a grievance or inquiry was 42 days on average. That was down from 50 days last year. Also, the average formal investigation took 286 days this year, down from 321 days last year.

Sellen said the statistics improved for two broad reasons. For one, fewer grievances were filed, he said.

Sellen said the decrease could be tied to the economy. He noted that his office began receiving more grievances during the economic recession that started in 2008.

Also helping has been a recent rule change that gives the OLR discretion over whether it will pursue de minimus violations, which are minor rule violations. Sellen estimated that the rule change allowed his office to dismiss 3 to 4 percent of the grievances it had received this past fiscal year.

The rule requires the OLR to keep records of its investigations into de minimus violations but allows it to decide whether a matter is actually significant enough to be worth pursuing. Sellen said he and his investigators have yet to see the new the office’s discretionary powers go awry. He, for instance, has not seen a case in which a lawyer has managed to get a grievance involving a de minimus violation dismissed and then gone on to be hit with other grievances.

The OLR also ended the most recent fiscal year with fewer matters pending before than the year before. At the end of the 2016-17 fiscal year, the office had  549 matters before it, including 196 formal investigations. That was down from the 593 matters that were before it in the previous year.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to state that the Office of Lawyer Regulation has asked a pair of professors to go over several years, not decades, of grievance data. The story was also corrected to state that grievances are down this fiscal year, not up, from last. Follow @erikastrebel