Court Opinion

ID: 9703241
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:46:57.93936+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:46.729348
License: Public Domain

CLIFFORD, Justice,
concurring.
So persuasively — as always — does our dissenting colleague express his views that I write separately only to set forth the basis of my disagreement with him.
Respondent settled his client Irving’s third-party claim against Yellow Freight Lines. The $45,000 settlement was encumbered by a lien of Irving’s employer’s worker’s compensation carrier, which had paid compensation benefits. Respondent had agreed to hold $11,000 in trust to pay the compensation lien. He did not do that. Instead, he diverted $6,400 of that money to his client Kaufman’s wife, having previously used Kaufman’s funds to pay his own personal obligations.
Moreover, three days after he had settled the Irving claim with Yellow Freight Lines in August 1987, respondent told the *180compensation carrier’s representative only that Yellow Freight had made a settlement offer. One does not need an elaborate support staff or paralegal assistance or computer printouts to recognize the difference between an offer and a closed deal, or, more to the point here, between the truth and an outright misrepresentation. Not surprisingly, when the compensation carrier inquired.periodically during 1988 about the status of the case, its letters went unanswered. Not until the carrier pressed its claim through outside counsel did respondent pay the compromised amount of the lien — sixteen months after Yellow Freight’s settlement draft had been deposited in his trust account.
These few remarks are not designed to disparage respondent, who has brought enough grief on himself. Rather their purpose is only to dispel any notion implicit in the dissent that respondent has somehow been victimized by the “demands of a system geared toward big-firm practice,” infra at 185, 578 A.2d at 1225, or that we are dealing here with nothing more serious than a little “bad bookkeeping,” infra at 185, 578 A.2d at 1225. Given respondent’s blatant falsehoods concerning the compensation lien and his shell game with other people’s money, the fact that he did not surround himself with the lavish trappings of a big-time law firm is of monumental irrelevance. We are talking about simple truth and fair dealing here. One must wonder at our colleague’s acceptance of respondent’s professional colleague’s assurance, infra at 185, 578 A.2d at 1225 that “when [respondent] says something to be true, it is true.”
Sadly, it is not.