High court revokes Beaver Dam lawyer’s license

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to revoke the license of a lawyer alleged to have taken thousands of dollars from his ward’s estate.

Tuesday’s disciplinary action stems in part from an Office of Lawyer Regulation complaint filed in September against Richard Steffes of Steffes Law Office alleging six counts of misconduct stemming from his conduct in a guardianship case in Dodge County.

The agency alleged that Steffes, who had been appointed a guardian in 1975, took thousands from his ward’s estate and failed to follow a judge’s order calling on him repay the estate and pay the fees of the guardian ad litem that had to be assigned to the guardianship as a result of his conduct. The judge reported Steffes to the OLR.

The OLR asked the court in the complaint to suspend Steffes’ license for three years and ordered him to pay back more than $11,000 to the guardianship account.

But Steffes and the OLR filed paperwork on Feb. 15 in which Steffes voluntarily petitioned the court to revoke his license because he could not defend himself from the allegations laid out in the OLR’s complaint and from allegations stemming from the OLR’s pending investigation into a grievance filed by another client.

That client had hired Steffes to be the probate lawyer for her late husband’s estate, and while he filed the necessary report and transferred all the estate’s assets to the client, Steffes failed to close the estate on time and eventually did so while his license had been suspended for previous misconduct.

In a per curiam decision handed down Tuesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to revoke Steffes’ license. The justices also ordered him to pay back the $11,384.88 he was alleged to have taken from his ward’s estate.

However, Justice Shirley Abrahamson, in a separate writing joined by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, wrote that while she agreed that Steffes violated the attorney-ethics code and should be disciplined, the license revocation was too harsh. Judging from the court’s previous cases,the three years the OLR had initially asked for seemed about right, Abrahamson wrote. Follow @erikastrebel