Court Opinion

ID: 9517634
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 00:24:05.901351+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:03:26.241612
License: Public Domain

Wilkins, J.
(dissenting, with whom Hennessey, C.J., joins). The modest discipline of public censure the court imposes threatens the public’s respect for the legal profession and will impair the public’s confidence in this court’s regulation of the bar.
*134The misconduct of the attorney in this case far exceeds the relatively limited misconduct of the attorney in Case Three discussed in Discipline of an Attorney, 392 Mass. 827 (1984). Bar Counsel points to meaningful differences, most of which the opinion of the court ignores. Ante at 130-131. To characterize those differences as a matter of degree simply fails to deal with their substantive significance. The attorney intentionally used more than $80,000 of one client’s funds to pay off other clients and to pay office expenses. His misuse of various clients’ funds continued over more than a year until complaint was made against him. Funds of some clients were used to repay others. The attorney has not made full restitution because he has not paid interest on the clients’ funds he misappropriated (and, concomitantly, he had the free use of the funds during periods of relatively high interest rates). A panel of the Board of Bar Overseers which considered this matter concluded properly that the attorney converted his clients’ funds. To say, as the court does, that there was no wrongful intent is simply incorrect (ante at 130), just as it is wrong for the court to rely on facts not found by the full board, its panel, or the hearing committee.
I would accept the recommendation of the full Board of Bar Overseers and Bar Counsel that the attorney be suspended from the practice of law for two years. Quite frankly, if this case had come before me as a single justice, I would never have guessed that a majority of my colleagues would have favored public censure over a suspension from the practice of the law. Discipline more serious than a public censure has been the general practice in cases involving a conversion of clients’ funds and an absence of full restitution.