Attorney threatened with license revocation for latest dozen counts of misconduct

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A western Wisconsin attorney with a lengthy disciplinary history could lose his law license for good for his latest dozen counts of misconduct.

The Office of Lawyer Regulation filed its fourth complaint against the Hudson attorney Christopher Petros, who a referee said “should seriously consider whether another occupation would suit him better” in another pending case with dozens more misconduct charges.

The latest complaint, filed on April 8, accuses the solo practitioner of 16 counts of misconduct. The charges stem from four separate matters over the past three years.

More than half of the charges resulted from a 2018 probate matter and a related civil case. The OLR said Petros prepared his clients for trial and participated in a civil trial himself while his license was temporarily suspended for failing to cooperate with an OLR investigation in an unrelated matter.

On the fourth day of the trial, the judge stated on the record that he’d received an order that said Petros’ license had been reinstated. The OLR said this was the first time the judge, counsel and clients found out Petros’ license had been suspended.

According to the complaint, Petros told the court that he had sent a letter to the Clerk of the Supreme Court’s office asking for an amendment to the order. Petros claimed he spoke with someone at the clerk’s office who said his license would be reinstated before the trial.

However, the clerk’s office had no record of receiving the letter around the time of the trial. Staff employees at the clerk’s office also said no one would have told Petros when his license would be reinstated. That’s because the office would have no previous knowledge of when reinstatement orders would be issued.

The OLR charged Petros with nine counts of misconduct related to practicing while his license was suspended, lying about the letter and failing to respond in a timely manner to the OLR’s investigation.

The additional charges detailed in the complaint accuse Petros of taking a $5,000 payment from a client, even though he had been appointed to represent the defendant by the State Public Defender, along with failing to respond to inquiries about various grievances in other cases.

The OLR is asking the state Supreme Court to revoke Petros’ law license, order him to pay $5,000 in restitution and grant other such relief, including an award of costs.

The revocation request is the latest action in Petros’ disciplinary history. According to a referee’s report filed in March, Petros pleaded no contest to 24 charges of misconduct alleged in a pending disciplinary case. The complaint originally charged him with more than a dozen misconduct violations, but it was later amended to increase the counts to 24.

The referee is recommending a two-year license suspension with conditions of reinstatement, a payment of $24,000 to the Wisconsin Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection and payment of the costs of the proceeding.

Petros also received a consensual public reprimand in 2017 for failing to prepare a contract, among other violations, and a 90-day law license suspension in 2014 as reciprocal discipline for misconduct violations in Minnesota.

Allan Beatty, the referee in the pending disciplinary case, noted that Petros committed all of the alleged misconduct in a relatively short amount of time. Petros has only been practicing law since 2009.

“This pattern raises the question whether the Respondent should be practicing law at all,” Beatty wrote in a March 16 report. “Certainly Attorney Petros needs to seriously consider whether another occupation would suit him better.”

Petros did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Follow @WLJReporter