Referee: Green Bay attorney should get private, not public slap on wrist

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A referee is recommending that a Green Bay attorney suspected of mishandling clients’ fees be disciplined privately, not publicly.

About two years ago, lawyer-regulators had charged Alf Langan with 11 counts of misconduct. The Office of Lawyer Regulation had alleged that Langan would enter advanced fee agreements with clients, who would pay all or part of the fee. Yet, despite his entering into those agreements, Langan would fail to give his clients an accounting of those fees at the end of his representation of them and would take months to refund unearned fees.

The OLR had sought for Langan to be publicly reprimanded. That would have prevented his license from being suspended but would have caused the final decision in his disciplinary case to be sent to his hometown newspaper and made publicly available.

Langan answered the complaint, contending that he had followed the rules by informing his clients at the beginning of his representation of them and that he had provided the required accounting using monthly billing statements. The delay in refunds, he contended, was because of cash-flow troubles caused by his firm’s closing on more cases than expected.

Langan and the OLR eventually reached a stipulation in which Langan admitted to the allegations in the complaint and agreed to testify consistently with a letter sent to a lawyer representing the OLR. Even so, Langan argued that a private reprimand was sufficient.

Like a public reprimand, a private reprimand does not involve a license suspension. But unlike a public reprimand, a private reprimand leads only to the OLR’s publishing a summary that does not identify the lawyer who has been disciplined.

The referee in the case, Rick Esenberg, issued a report on Nov. 8 agreeing with Langan that the reprimand ought to be private. He found that Langan had committed all 11 counts of misconduct. He noted that the allegations involving the fee-agreement violations were technical and that he was more concerned about Langan’s delay in refunding unearned fees. However, he said that, judging from the record, the delay appeared to be the result of Langan’s firm’s cash-flow troubles. He said the OLR had provided no evidence showing there was another cause.

“He was strapped for cash,” Esenberg wrote. “He owed the money. He needed to pay it. The delay in doing so violates the rules. But it is more a breach of contract than” a willful disregard of professional obligations. will full regard (sic) of professional obligations.”