Referee: Madison lawyer should return $5K, be publicly reprimanded

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A referee is recommending that the Wisconsin Supreme Court publicly reprimand a Madison lawyer and order her to return $5,000 to a client.

The recommendation stems from a complaint filed in October against Sarah Clemment of the Madison-based Clemment Law Office. The Office of Lawyer regulation charged her with six counts of misconduct stemming from her representation of a criminal defendant in a homicide case in Dane County.

According to the complaint, the defendant hired Clemment in January 2016, paying her $5,000 and signing a flat-fee agreement. Clemment, who practices immigration law, had never been involved in a homicide case or jury trial before and hadn’t consulted an experienced criminal-defense lawyer, the OLR alleges.

Among other things, Clemment is alleged to have filed a motion to sequester the jury although she had no evidence to back up her request and misunderstood the standard for filing a motion in limine.

In August 2016, the judge tossed Clemment from the case, less than two weeks before the trial started. The judge called her “grossly incompetent” for failing to raise objections to the state’s arguments for a motion in limine and for not being able to answer the court’s questions about the fundamentals of the rules of evidence, according to the OLR.

The judge had asked Clemment, among other things, what “impeachment by prior conviction” and “exclusion of witnesses” meant. Clemment could not answer those questions correctly, the agency noted in its complaint.

Clemment’s troubles did not end there. Not only did she still owe $5,000 to her client, but she also had not produced the sort of paperwork that’s required by the state’s attorney-ethics rules when a lawyer wants to cease representing a particular client, according to the complaint.

The OLR sought a public reprimand. Clemment never filed an answer, so the referee in the case, Nick Schweitzer, found her in default. He adopted the OLR’s allegations as his findings of fact and adopted the OLR’s request for a public reprimand. He issued his report in April.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is reviewing Schweitzer’s recommendations and is scheduled to issue a final decision in the case on Friday. Clemment is representing herself, and the OLR is being represented by Gregg Herman of Milwaukee-based Loeb & Herman.

This is not Clemment’s first encounter with the OLR. In 2011, the justices publicly reprimanded her for, among other things, failing to keep a client informed, failing to appear at a client’s asylum-application hearing and lying to the court.

Clemment earned her law degree from the Iowa City-based University of Iowa College of Law in 2000. Her license is in good standing, according to the State Bar of Wisconsin and OLR websites. Follow @erikastrebel