Case Name: In re William S. BACH, Respondent. A Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (Bar Registration No. 448392)
Court: District of Columbia Court of Appeals
Jurisdiction: District of Columbia
Decision Date: 2009-02-26
Citations: 966 A.2d 350
Docket Number: No. 07-BG-1389
Parties: In re William S. BACH, Respondent. A Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (Bar Registration No. 448392).
Judges: Before REID, Associate Judge, and FERREN and FARRELL, Senior Judges.
Reporter: West's Atlantic Reporter, Second Series
Volume: 966
Pages: 350–367

Head Matter:
In re William S. BACH, Respondent. A Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (Bar Registration No. 448392).
No. 07-BG-1389.
District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Argued Jan. 27, 2009.
Decided Feb. 26, 2009.
William S. Bach, Washington, pro se.
Joseph N. Bowman, Assistant Bar Counsel, with whom Wallace E. Shipp, Jr., Bar Counsel, and Julia L. Porter, Senior Assistant Bar Counsel, were on the brief, for the Office of Bar Counsel.
Before REID, Associate Judge, and FERREN and FARRELL, Senior Judges.

Opinion:
FARRELL, Senior Judge:
Respondent, while serving as conservator for the estate of a 92-year-old woman, wrote himself a check from the estate for his services knowing that he was not authorized to do so without court approval, which he had not yet received. The Board on Professional Responsibility, in agreement with a Hearing Committee, concluded that this was intentional misappropriation of client funds and, accordingly, recommends that respondent be disbarred. See Rule of Professional Conduct 1.15(a); In re Addams, 579 A.2d 190 (D.C.1990) (en banc).
We accept the Board's conclusions and recommendation, which are supported by its thorough and well-reasoned opinion. We attach the relevant parts of the opinion hereto, with record citations deleted (and footnotes renumbered). We add the following brief discussion that assumes familiarity with the Board's report and chiefly addresses the Board's stated concern that Addams ' strong presumption of disbarment as the proper sanction for intentional misappropriation may result in an unjust disposition here.
Respondent wrote himself a check for attorney's fees in the amount of $2,500 from the ward's modest estate, knowing that he was thereby violating D.C.Code § 21-2060(a) (2001) and Superior Court Probate Rule 308, both requiring advance court approval of payment for attorney conservator services. As the Board and the Hearing Committee found, his reason for doing so was simple: the ward's nursing home had made a claim against the estate, and respondent was afraid that if he waited for court approval of his fee petition, "there would be no funds left to pay my fees." Respondent thus con ceded that the act was deliberate, and so he cannot rely on the extenuation we found in In re Fair, 780 A.2d 1106 (D.C.2001), where the lawyer had relied on "an ambiguous probate culture" to mitigate her taking of unapproved fees despite a similar statutory bar governing work on decedents' estates. Id. at 1113. Respondent, unlike Fair, was under no misapprehension of his duty to obtain advance court approval. Thus, the rule of Addams applies, which holds that [b]ecause the "breach of trust" entailed by intentional misappropriation "is so reprehensible, striking at the core of the attorney-client relationship," . "[o]nly the most stringent of extenuating circumstances [will] justify a lesser disciplinary sanction such as suspension." In re Pennington, 921 A.2d 135, 141 (D.C.2007) (quoting Addams, 579 A.2d at 193, 198-99). As the Board correctly found, no such circumstances are present here.
The Board nevertheless has expressed strong misgivings about the justice of applying Addams ' presumption of disbarment to respondent's case:
[I]f we had the discretion to do so, we would not subject a lawyer whose only violation consists of prematurely taking a legitimately earned fee to the same draconian sanction that is appropriately imposed on a lawyer who deliberately steals client funds. The latter is undoubtedly far more serious than the former, constitutes an extraordinary violation of the client's trust and more seriously undermines public confidence in the integrity of the legal profession— the underlying considerations cited by the Addams Court. Addams, 579 A.2d at 193-94. We have no doubt that the public would recognize that these two forms of misconduct, though both serious, are fundamentally different and that the former warrants a less severe though substantial sanction.... [Disbarring Respondent effectively equates his misconduct with the most egregious and dishonest misappropriations that victimize clients, and needlessly deprives the Court and an underserved public of a capable conservator who made a single mistake that ultimately caused no harm.
In his brief, Bar Counsel does not address these expressed concerns at all, but we must do so. The Board either is asking the division to craft an exception to the strict Addams rule for respondent's behavior, or is implicitly asking the court to reconsider Addams' holding that "in virtually all cases of misappropriation, disbarment will be the only appropriate sanction unless it appears that the misconduct resulted from nothing more than simple negligence." Addams, 579 A.2d at 191. If the former, then we do not think the Board has furnished us with a principle on which to distinguish our prior decisions. Its comparison of respondent to a lawyer who "deliberately steals client funds" appears to stress the fact that respondent was later found to have "legitimately earned [the] fee" he took. But attorneys heretofore disbarred for misappropriation — including Addams himself, see 579 A.2d at 192-93 — have likewise claimed they had earned or were otherwise entitled to the funds, see also, e.g., In re Pels, 653 A.2d 388, 397 (D.C.1995), and the court has been unmoved by such expectations of (or wagers on) after-the-fact ratification. E.g., In re Utley, 698 A.2d 446, 450 (D.C.1997) (rejecting attorney's reliance on later "ratification").
It is also true, as the Board notes, that respondent did not conceal his self-payment, in the sense that he later disclosed it in his annual accounting (filed over a year after the check was written), thus enabling the probate court through its "supervisory mechanisms" to discover it and take appropriate action. But an attorney who knows he has done what the law forbids may not leave it to chance or the diligence of auditors to bring (or not bring) the action to light; and so the fact that respondent revealed the improper payment confirms only, we think, that he acted without the "moral corruptness" of an intent to deceive — a factor that Addams makes irrelevant to deliberate misappropriation and the attendant sanction. See 579 A.2d at 196-97. Finally, although respondent committed only a "single mistake" involving a modest sum of client money, Addams rejected repetition — or multiple misdeeds — as the key to the required sanction in this area of taking client funds, see id. at 198, and we see no difference in principle between an attorney who takes a much larger unauthorized fee and respondent's action in taking money from an estate that (according to his later accounting) totalled less than $12,000.
Consequently, while disbarment may appear "draconian" as applied to respondent's conduct, the Board has not defined for us an exception of principle to Addams' rule that does not risk "simply paying lip service" to it. Pels, 653 A.2d at 398. Disbarment under Addams is not reserved for the "most egregious and dishonest" instances of intentional misappropriation, and the Board's own recommendation of disbarment effectively admits that respondent's conduct differed only in degree, not kind, from cases in which the Addams rule has been applied unyieldingly. See, e.g., In re Robinson, 583 A.2d 691 (D.C.1990) (attorney disbarred for misappropriation despite relatively small sum involved, quick restoration of funds, lack of financial harm to client, single instance of misappropriation, and attorney's relative inexperience, absence of a prior disciplinary record, and favorable character testimony).
It is probable, therefore, that the Board, without expressly saying so, sees this as a case that invites reconsideration of Addams. In that regard, we confine ourselves to restating what the division in Pels said in rejecting the recommendation by Board members of a "stay" of disbarment there:
Individual members of this division . believe the result Addams dictates in this case is a harsh one. On the other hand, . in Addams the court weighed the concern of seemingly unjust application of a categorical sanction to particular cases against "our concern . that there not be an erosion of public confidence in the integrity of the bar. Simply put, where client funds are involved, a more stringent rule is appropriate." Addams, 579 A.2d at 198. Whether the paramount goal of deterrence that drove the decision in Addams can be achieved by lesser, more case-individual sanctions for misappropriation is an issue the full court is always free to revisit — though with the attendant risk of loss of predictability in our exercise of this most critical feature of our regulatory supervision. The division's obligation in this case, in any event, is clear.
653 A.2d at 398.
Accordingly, respondent William S. Bach is hereby disbarred from the practice of law in the District of Columbia effective thirty days from the date of this opinion.
So ordered.
. The Board also concluded that respondent had violated Rule 1.5(a), which prohibits a lawyer from taking a fee prohibited by law— something respondent had done by ignoring the requirement of prior court approval.
. The Board and the Hearing Committee both rejected, as do we, respondent's unsupported claim that an auditor of the Probate Court had told him that his petition for court approval had been granted.
. We have found "extraordinary circumstances" justifying a lesser sanction under Addams "in only one situation: where the attorney is suffering from a disabling addiction, such as chronic alcoholism, and the addiction is shown to have been the cause of the misconduct." In re Pierson, 690 A.2d 941, 950 (D.C.1997).
.As the Court of Appeals of Maryland has said, "Arguing that an unauthorized 'advance' was later approved as a fee is little better than arguing that a fiduciary may dip into the client's funds for a 'loan' as long as the money is later repaid." Attorney Grievance Comm'n of Maryland v. Owrutsky, 322 Md. 334, 587 A.2d 511, 516 (1991).
. When the unapproved payment was detected, Judge Burgess held a hearing, removed respondent as conservator, and referred the matter to Bar Counsel.
. The court rejected a stay of disbarment (in favor of suspension plus probation) because it "believe[d] that would enervate, if not destroy, the deterrent force of the rule reaffirmed in Addams." Pels, 653 A.2d at 389.
. Our decision makes it unnecessary to consider Bar Counsel's argument that the Board and the Hearing Committee erroneously failed to find an additional violation of Rule 8.4(d) (conduct seriously interfering with the administration of justice) for respondent's same conduct. See, e.g., In re Gil, 656 A.2d 303, 304 (D.C. 1995).