Referee recommends four-month suspension for Oshkosh personal injury lawyer

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A referee is recommending that some misconduct charges against an Oshkosh attorney be dismissed and that the disciplinary measures imposed on him should be less than lawyer-regulators had sought.

The recommendation stems from an Office of Lawyer Regulation complaint filed in 2015 against George Curtis, a personal-injury lawyer, alleging seven counts of misconduct. Some of the allegations stem from his conviction in 2014 for failing to pay taxes for two years and others from his management of his firm’s trust account. According to the OLR, Curtis failed to follow proper trust-accounting procedures and the firm thus could not ascertain who owed $29,000 in its trust account.

The OLR had sought for Curtis’ license to be revoked, which would have banned Curtis from practicing law indefinitely, though he would have been able to apply for reinstatement after five years.

A hearing on the matter was held in 2016 before the court appointed a referee in the case, Rick Esenberg. Esenberg filed a report on Tuesday recommending that four of the counts of misconduct against Curtis be dismissed because the OLR had not met his burden of proof.

He also recommended that Curtis’ license only be suspended for 120 days, provided that Curtis meet certain conditions. Among other things, Curtis will have certify to the OLR that his firm has a system to ensure that trust account rules are followed by both him and his staff.

Esenberg said revocation wasn’t an appropriate disciplinary measure in Curtis’ case.

“Revocation is limited to the most egregious cases,” he wrote. “This case isn’t even close to that.”

But Esenberg did note that the trust-account violations the OLR succeeded on would have warranted only a public reprimand, had there not been more than $20,000 in the firm’s trust account for which an owner could not be identified.

“There is no excuse for that and Mr. Curtis’ failure to know that the trust account did not balance suggests a level of inattention that requires more,” Esenberg wrote.

Among the other factors Esenberg considered was Curtis’ lack of history of being disciplined by the court for more than 50 years, his serving prison time for a conviction of tax evasion, Curtis’ age, and testimony from other attorneys, including the Appleton attorney John Claypool and Fond du Lac attorney James Herrick.

Curtis, now 81, had attempted to enter into evidence dozens of character reference letters that were part of his sentencing proceeding. Esenberg sustained the OLR’s objection to them on the grounds that they were hearsay while also noting that they were not needed in light of testimony presented at the hearing.

“I am easily able to find that Mr. Curtis is a first-rate trial lawyer with an excellent reputation among members of the bar,” wrote Esenberg.

Curtis, who is represented by the Madison attorney Claude Covelli of Boardman & Clark,  may choose to appeal the recommendations. The Wisconsin Supreme Court will issue a final decision in the case after reviewing Esenberg’s findings. Follow @erikastrebel