Madison lawyer appealing recommended license suspension

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A Madison lawyer is appealing a referee’s recommendation that he be found guilty of breaking attorney-ethics rules 19 times and that his license be suspended for a year.

The recommendation stems from a complaint filed more than a year ago by the Office of Lawyer Regulation alleging Michael Bauer had mishandled more than $700,000 that he should have been holding in trust for clients.

The 30-page complaint detailed 28 charges of misconduct involving several of the clients he had while working at Bauer & Bach in Madison. That firm dissolved in 2015.

In the complaint, the OLR had asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to suspend Bauer’s license for three years.

The OLR and Bauer reached a stipulation in May in which Bauer admitted to 14 counts of misconduct and the OLR agreed to dismiss seven charges. Bauer contested seven of the remaining charges, all of which involved allegations that Bauer had broken a rule prohibiting lawyers from engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.

Bauer contended that the facts did not support the charges. Because the OLR had already charged him with trust-account violations for the same conduct, he argued that neither the state nor federal constitution would make him open to those charges.

In a report filed on Aug. 8, the referee in the case, John Murphy, accepted the stipulation and rejected Bauer’s arguments but found that Bauer had committed only five of those seven contested charges. But he noted that a hearing in May had included evidence suggesting that Bauer was constantly “robbing Peter to pay Paul” and that he had used his trust account as “something akin to a slush fund.”

In a second report filed on Oct. 13, Murphy recommended that Bauer’s license be suspended for one year and that he pay the full cost of the proceeding, calling the two-year suspension the OLR had sought excessive given that he had no previous discipline.

Bauer filed a notice on Wednesday of his appeal of Murphy’s recommendations. The Wisconsin Supreme Court will review Murphy’s recommendations and issue a final decision in the matter. Follow @erikastrebel