i would like to know at this stage counsel have you thought about how you wish to proceed yes john or i have just a very brief statement i'd like to make to the court and offends and other ethics issues i have never had a client who gets to know as he and devotes it's also completely to remedying this situation that led to it like mr toronto has done honestly he's made it so mr bender and i really just have to present to you what he's done he did the work for us he lived mr trotter had lived and breathed this since it came down on november th he completely cleared his calendar  and sat down to dissect and analyzed the o s b and every single case mentioned in it he had taken the appropriate action on every single one of those cases from rewriting and refiling the substantive briefed to simply dismissing he's been that warranted it and providing refunds to clients to finding other avenues of relief for his clients he's done the right thing twelve hours early and reviewed the court educational materials on its website which are really in depth and useful to a practitioner and finally he cleaned up his office staff and replaced non lawyer so that didn't stop her and it didn't lead him to continuance of his hearing or otherwise delay were such important issues that he continued to work through that thank given the remedial actions that he's taken we ask the court to at least consider whether what he's already done is to discharge the and if it's not then we ask the court to impose no more than an admonition on him but at this time we want to open ourselves up to you so you answer any questions you might have that we perhaps failed to address in our submissions or maybe something we've got in there has raised a question for you so that we can we can be here and answer everything that comes to mind for you thank you counsel mr toronto my st question to you is are you able to participate ok well i'm i'm sorry to hear that and i hope i wish you a speedy recovery thank you so i'm going to ask some questions but what i'd like to do mr toronto is have mr scherer and minister the you firm the statements are about to make up the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth that you offer them under penalty of perjury i do ok thank you so i  recapitulate what you stated i understand that you you obtained your legal training in mexico and completed that program at the university of two thousand and then obtained an l l m in international trade law at the university of arizona in two thousand and two you were admitted to the arizona bar in two thousand and four is that correct that is correct you are right now the next piece of information that i see from your submission is that you were employed by the windsor law firm in two thousand and seven and so my st question is what did you do between two thousand and four all right so then you for for the next five years or so until two thousand and twelve you were working with the windsor law firm and then according to its a letter from so i'm interested in understanding in this period of time from two thousand and twelve until the order to show cause  issues interesting to know how you organized your for and who was responsible for doing the work before the immigration judge who was responsible for appeals i decided to replace them with a choice  circuit where those cases generally for clients that you had also represented in the immigration court and the board of immigration appeals for the most part yes with the exception of  initial retainer agreement did that initial retainer agreement play fees that would be charged for appeals to the board of immigration appeals or to petition for a view to the  and then would you execute a new agreement with a new fee structure or the best director and with that same process occur after the be a decision came out would you then again confer with the client there a flat fee that you charge for the th circuit representation or it was a tiered fee structure if you had to file a brief that you would charge so much if there was an oral argument you were charged so much  and you talk about overreliance on the paralegals grant so let me see if i can understand what happened in this in the alvarez case in terms of how you utilize paralegals in that case let's start at the board of immigration appeals because i think there was i think i recall some statement about a paralegal from a probe a little deeper into that when you say that the paralegal prepared the brave to what extent did you delegate responsibility to the paralegal or the briefin suggests that you realized right away but you considered and rejected trying to rectify things the board  would consider the rules of a court and how you navigate a court to be more than nuances that seems to be required of anybody appearing in a court to figure out what they have to do in order to cause there was so deficiency and this is not you know as simply all a d matter d of being an effective of cases and so when cases come in three different charges are tasked with the responsibility to review the briefs and record and then make a decision that is an enormous amount of the extreme leave valuable resource and not to mention each of them have staffs their traditional assistance of law clerks there the court has its own staff staff attorneys clerks paralegals all of whom devote time to every single every single petition for review and when an attorney doesn't comply with court rause it's our burden on the court sometimes the court takes extraordinary steps to try to figure out what's going on to do justice but that's the expenditure of additional valuable time there could be spent on other cases so here we have all these cases that you file that the court is spending a whole lot of time on instead of on other cases where the lawyers have done the job correctly and presented the case that the judges can  problem but the level  submissions by your clients and by the legal community and are impressive and show that you are in that you've done a very good job as an immigration lawyer  a number of instances where the government filed a motion to dismiss pointing out deficiencies in the briefing did that ever raise you and sometimes you feel that you have a good case and you don't but also i have to learn to start if i'm playing once representation and the argument is harder to say no and in many of those cases i was trying to help them and doesn't or doesn't apply to this case he says this case is about x but it's actually about why so we moved to this mess because he hasn't supported is arguments with analysis the quality is much better actually and those ways were not under his supervision and he has been a great help to the right let me turn to mr reasons or for a moment and thank you for appearing today why don't you fill me in on what your expectation is what you've been doing what you expect to do in the future in your role  was that the judge is know the law clerks know the law for the record is your opportunity to introduce your client to the in your your brief and so that was one of the st lessons that i taught him and he's really taken to it and so what i'm going to continue to do for him is i haven't completed  reviewing all of the pending matters on which mr trotter who is currently counsel but i'm tending to do that over the next you know few weeks and months or one it takes to do that  that's the one that's to the th we believe that's correct your honor we were actually talking about it last night talking about a strategy regarding whether to proceed with untrue to be granted cat really but even that under the circumstances pretty unlikely so we're we're we still haven't made a decision as to whether we're going to file a brief or see a carpet oil about mediations case so that's the next only attorney that i mentor and i just this is it is my st time entering officially and mr toronto in my opinion kind of fell victim to what a lot of other immigration lawyers victims too is will be issuing a report and recommendation about the appropriate outcome you know will serve out on you and you'll have an opportunity to file comments or objections much looking forward to that so if i may if you find all if it's possible to respond quickly to this report a recommendation that will enable me to complete my work before my retirement and i would like to do that i don't think i'm going to have to say anything more about that but i urge you to do that if it's in all possible i realize it's a difficult time of year to be making that request although now with the way she and i guess people are doing the usual kinds of things that one would do spank you for your work at the court of appeals i think that spank you enough for that but i also don't want to end this without telling you that the steps we've taken since the order to show cause are impressive and this is why i would have hoped a lawyer would do it's the kind of thing that we ask lawyers d to do in response to in order to show cause when we do a report and like an invitation the fact that you've done this in advance is it is very good news d for me is me a great deal of optimism that no matter what the outcome is d here i think  that your future prospects are rosy in terms of your legal career and i urge you to keep the we keep your eyes on the prize and continue to do that thank you your honor and i will continue to