Court Opinion

ID: 9847791
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:07:32.3816+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:17:34.562965
License: Public Domain

NEELY, Justice,
dissenting:
I am shocked by the unsporting conduct of the Charleston Area Medical Center. CAMC is not an ordinary lay-person, baffled by the glacial pace of justice or perplexed by the seemingly impossible disaster of losing a just cause. CAMC is a professional player whose own lawyer performed negligently and incompetently, if not in willful contempt of Judge Kaufman’s court.
Judge Kaufman did not respond in an unsporting way by imposing a sanction (such as dismissal of CAMC’s case) conceivably forcing CAMC into the expense of an appeal. Judge Kaufman simply called the client to suggest that one of its own bevy of retained lawyers — perhaps a competent advocate who regularly arose sufficiently early to attend court — appear on the case at the next hearing. Furthermore, all the evidence from the complainants showed that the conversation between the judge and CAMC’s CEO, Philip Goodwin, was entirely amiable, notwithstanding that it perhaps wandered a bit afield.
Mr. Goodwin believed that Judge Kaufman was trying to influence CAMC’s position in the case before him. See maj. op. at 4. I do not condone ex parte communication by judges, and I certainly do not condone attempts by judges to influence cases before them. But in this case the conversation was brought on by the negligence of CAMC’s own counsel. Ex turpi causa non oritur actio.
The senior partner of CAMC’s law firm who advised Mr. Goodwin to file an ethics complaint over a nit-picking trifle was decidedly misguided. Law should be a profession practiced among gentlemen.1 And this is a dispute that should have been *172settled in a gentlemanly manner, without unnecessary resort to the disciplinary process, particularly in a small community where the same lawyers must work with one another and the same judges on a daily basis. As I learned in my days in the Legislature: what goes around comes around!
I am authorized to state that Justice WORKMAN joins me in this dissent.

. See The Committee on Legal Ethics of the West Virginia State Bar v. Thomas L. Craig, Jr., A Member of the West Virginia State Bar, 187 W.Va. 14, 415 S.E.2d 255 (1992) (Brotherton, J., dissenting).