Court suspends Milwaukee attorney’s license for 18 months

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has suspended the license of a Milwaukee attorney convicted of stealing money from an estate and declined to make the suspension retroactive.

The disciplinary action taken Wednesday stems from a complaint the Office of Lawyer Regulation filed against the Milwaukee attorney Thad Jelinske in 2016, alleging 23 counts of misconduct involving the estate of a deceased real estate developer from Brookfield. The OLR sought a year-and-a-half license suspension of Jelinske’s law license.

According to the OLR’s allegations, Jelinske gave false testimony during the estate’s probate proceedings and wrote checks from the estate’s account to pay personal expenses, such as his wife’s credit-card bill.

Earlier in 2016, Jelinske, a former senior partner at the Milwaukee-based firm Mawicke & Goisman, pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor charges of theft involving the estate and was sentenced by a Waukesha County judge in 2016 to 5 months in jail as a condition to 18 months of probation. Also as a condition of probation, the court barred Jelinske from acting as a fiduciary.

Jelinske, who was represented by Dean Dietrich of the Wausau-based firm Ruder Ware, eventually pleaded no contest to the OLR’s charges as part of a stipulation reached with the OLR. He agreed to a retroactive year-and-a-half license suspension that would start Oct. 16, 2017, the date he resigned from his law firm. The OLR agreed to dismiss eight of the 23 charges listed in the complaint.

The referee in the case, Jonathan Goodman, accepted the terms of the stipulation and found that Jelinske had committed 15 of the counts of misconduct laid out in the OLR’s complaint.

Goodman agreed with the parties’s stipulation, finding that Jelinske’s behavior warranted a retroactive, 18-month suspension.

However, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday disagreed with Goodman that the suspension should be retroactive.

The justices pointed out that, in October 2017, the judge in Jelinske’s criminal case had noted that Jelinske had been practicing law despite the condition of his probation preventing him from acting as a fiduciary. Generally, lawyers have fiduciary duties to their clients. The following month, the judge extended Jelinske’s probation for another year and banned Jelinske from acting as either an attorney or a fiduciary. The judge also had noted that he had considered imposing additional jail time on Jelinske.

The court typically doles out retroactive suspensions only if a “compelling circumstance mitigates the severity of the discipline.” As an example, the justices noted in the decision on Wednesday is that they might recommend a retroactive suspension in response to conduct that had prompted a previous suspension.

In Jelinske’s case, though, no such  circumstances exist, the justices found.

“We refuse to classify Attorney Jelinske’s belated compliance with the terms of his criminal sentence as a compelling circumstance that justifies leniency sufficient to permit him to petition for reinstatement of his law license not long after the issuance of this decision,” the court wrote on Wednesday.

Attorneys whose licenses are suspended for longer than six months may get their licenses back if they go through a reinstatement process that includes the presentation of evidence at a hearing before a referee.

Such attorneys may petition for reinstatement three months before their suspension expires. Had the justices agreed to suspend Jelinske’s license retroactively, he would have been able to request a reinstatement proceeding starting in February 2019.

The justice’s decision on Wednesday means Jelinske will not be able to petition for reinstatement until December 2019.

The court also ordered Jelinske to pay more than $13,000, which was the cost of the disciplinary proceeding.

Justice Rebecca Dallet did not participate in the decision. Follow @erikastrebel