High court suspends Walworth County lawyer

Listen to this article

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has suspended the law license of an attorney from East Troy who admitted to benefiting from a will she had drafted for a client.

Wednesday’s disciplinary action stems from a complaint filed in June by the Office of Lawyer Regulation charging Linda Gray with one count of misconduct for drafting and executing a will that bequeathed the balance of the client’s estate to Gray, who received nearly $300,000 from it.

Wisconsin attorney ethics rules prohibit lawyers from significantly benefiting from the wills of their clients, except under certain circumstances, such as when a client is a relative. In this case, Gray was not related to her client.

The OLR had asked the Supreme Court to suspend Gray’s license for 60 days. Gray and the OLR later reached a stipulation in September under which Gray pleaded no contest to the misconduct and admitted to the allegations in the complaint. Gray also agreed to the 60-day suspension.

The referee that presided over the case, Jonathan Goodman, filed a report accepting the stipulation but also recommending that Gray pay back the money she had received from the will. Goodman later walked back that recommendation for restitution after an evidentiary hearing during which two of the client’s long-time friends testified against restitution. Goodman agreed, noting, among other things, that there was no evidence of undue influence on the client.

The justices on Wednesday agreed with Goodman, noting that its case law requires a suspension rather than a reprimand. The justices pointed to a case from 1971 in which a lawyer from West Allis had benefited from the will of a client but enlisted another lawyer to draft the will.  The court found the first lawyer’s behavior called for a reprimand but warned that his conduct was a hairline away from conduct calling for a license suspension.

“Here, no daylight separates Attorney Gray’s actions from what we have demarked as unethical behavior, both by rule and by precedent,” the court wrote on Wednesday.

The justices noted that the 60-day license suspension is the minimum length of suspension the court can impose and that it was appropriate given that Gray had no significant history of professional misconduct and there was an “absolute absence” of evidence that she had taken advantage of her client, who was a long-time friend.

“By all indications, Attorney Gray’s preparation of M.A.’s will was misguided, not malevolent,” wrote the court.

The court also agreed that restitution was not appropriate given that, among other things, the client’s estate had already been fully probated.

The high court on Wednesday also ordered Gray to pay the cost of the proceeding. Her license suspension begins May 30. Follow @erikastrebel