PORTLAND, Maine — A Maine Supreme Judicial Court judge has dismissed ethics misconduct charges against six Verrill Dana attorneys over their alleged mishandling of a former partner’s misuse of funds.
Justice Donald Alexander on Friday dismissed in a one-page order the charges brought by the Maine Board of Overseers of the Bar but issued a warning to David Warren, James Kilbreth III, Eric Altholz, Mark Googins, Roger Clement Jr. and Juliet Browne.
They were members of the firm’s executive committee when it was discovered in 2007 that John Duncan was stealing from clients. Duncan, who has been disbarred, was convicted in 2008 and served two years in prison for two counts of theft, totaling nearly $300,000. He admitted to stealing from clients’ trust accounts for years.
The warning issued by Alexander will be noted by the Board of Overseers of the Bar, which administers and enforces a code of conduct and rules issued by the Maine Supreme Court. If the attorneys were found to have violated ethical standards, the warning could be considered in any future disciplinary action.
The six lawyers were accused of failing to take swift and appropriate action against Duncan. Alexander originally found that the attorneys had not violated any rules but instead acted out of concern for Duncan’s mental state because he appeared to be suicidal and refused to discuss what had happened.
In December, the court ruled 3-1 that the Verrill Dana lawyers had violated Maine ethics rules by failing to have policies ensuring that their attorneys follow Maine’s bar rules. The Justices also noted that the six lawyers did not violate their duty to report Duncan when the thefts were discovered.
Justices sent the case back to Alexander and ordered that appropriate sanction be levied.
The outcome was the one recommended by lawyers representing Verrill Dana, Melissa Hewey, the Portland attorney who represented Kilbreth, told a Portland newspaper Friday. Davis has asked for a reprimand, a more serious disciplinary action.
Efforts Saturday to reach Davis were unsuccessful.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Shakespeare had it right…
It seems to me to be a conflict of interest to have a lawyer judging the ethics of lawyers. A bit like a fox guarding the hen house.
This is outrageous! They fired the secretary that brought attention to Duncan’s misdeeds. Those attorneys knew about the misuse of funds and sought to sweep it under the rug until the secretary exposed them. They should all be disbarred and thrown in jail.
So the Maine Supreme Court voted 3-1 that these lawyers had violated Maine’s ethics rules, but then this one judge dismisses everything???
Just goes to show you that if you have enough money you can create your own miscarriage of justice. These clowns should have received an official reprimand if not a censure.
Finally the names have been put in the press! Why so long to keep them anonymous? I’ve been listening for months to Juliet Browne (working for First Wind) cross examine, attempt to trivialize simple folks’ testimonies and to infer that they were lying. As we now know, she’ll stoop to any means for her paid end.
Anyone else=book thrown at them. Lawyer=warning.
getting paid getting paid—agree with Bangorian’s comments–
Justice finally done. The whole disciplinary proceeding was a farce brought on by the envious lawyers on the Board of Overseers, some of whom wanted to see Verrill Dana hung out to dry.
Justice and Lawyers hmm,,,, can’t use them together unless you pay $$$ to the Union..!
Hay, what’s that smell..?
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Shakespeare.
Hope you never need a lawyer . Try having a car accident an you get hurt real bad an see what happends you would pay dearly with out a lawyer unless you are one your self .
I was just quoting a famous writer ;-)
He may be famous but he is wrong this time
Your opinion.
One incompetant person is a shame,
two is a law firm,
and three is a congress!
Thomas Jefferson!
Birds of a feather…..
See crime dose pay
Thinking back to Paul Violette’s “misuse of funds,” which should be called stealing from the taxpayers, and we find that he is pretty much getting off scott free, compared with the lawyer who stole less than Violette.
Justice and Lawyers , two words that should never be used in the same sentence.
Who cares if he was suicidal. His actions could have made his victims commit suicidal.
Here in Searsport back last month we had a chance to watch the creepy James T. Kilbreth creep around the back of our town hall auditorium whispering instructions to the PR team from DCP Midstream. The Big Gas guys with the funereally silent Mr. Kilbreth guiding them were in town doing their best to manipulate a packed house of deeply concerned townspeople into believing the would-be developers of a 14-story-high refrigerated propane megatank here had as their primary goal providing jobs starting at $65,000 a year to the first dozen locals who could produce a GED certificate.
Since then a great many of us in Searsport have been seeking a moratorium on this headlong rush to madness, what amounts to a mere two months time in which to examine how such an industrial behemoth abruptly dropped into the middle of this beautiful small town might affect our economy and our property values, change our preferred way of life, and even put our very lives at risk.
Mr. Kilbreth is senior counsel at Verrill Dana, among whose clients is DCP Midstream, itself a gas operations corporate front owned jointly by ConocoPhillips and Duke Energy (aka Spectra Energy). Verrill Dana also has a subsidiary, Maine Street Solutions, which provides other than strictly legal services to Verrill Dana’s clients. These services, some of them couched in vaguely weaselly terms, include old fashioned lobbying, PR and spinmeistering. But one of them is called “Community Relations.” Verrill Dana’s MSS explains, “We build public support across a wide range of constituencies…for commercial development and community issues which might otherwise face significant opposition and obstacles.”
Well, here in Searsport we’re learning what that means. We’ve seen a concerted operation to divide people with outright lies that those in opposition to Big Tank are “only a couple of summer people” who don’t want their view spoiled. We’ve seen them seduce our fire chief and our water utility superintendent with promises of new equipment and infrastructure upgrades. We’ve watched MSS pay out-of-work people with no dog in this fight $100 a day to go door-to-door handing out flyers against the moratorium that contain bald-faced falsehoods designed to mislead. We’ve seen them set up a Facebook page, Propane for Maine, in which those who politely raise difficult questions are deleted and forthwith blocked from further comment. We’ve even seen them generously host anonymous creations such as a certain “Jake Prodder” who indulge in varying degrees of personal nastiness toward Big Tank opponents on up to cyber harassment and extortion. It would seem a better name for Verrill Dana’s “community relations” service might be “Department of Dirty Tricks.”