"Lawyer Discipline in New York is ‘Seriously Deficient,’ Says NYU Professor"

The WSJ qutoes our own Stephen Gillers. Stephen's paper is here. Excerpt:

New York’s system for disciplining lawyers is shrouded in secrecy and riddled with inconsistency, according to a new paper by a leading legal ethics expert.

“A study of all lawyer discipline cases in New York from mid-2008 through 2013… reveals that the system for lawyer discipline in New York is seriously deficient,” writes New York University law professor Stephen Gillers.

The professor — whose article appears in the most recent issue of the “New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy” — levels a number of criticisms at the Empire State’s sanction system. One glaring weakness, he says, is how difficult it is for a prospective client to look up a lawyer’s disciplinary history.

“New York cloaks its process in secrecy unless and until a court imposes public discipline,” he writes. Most of the time, a sanction takes the form of a private reprimand. And even when a sanction is made public, according to Mr. Gillers, it’s hard to find.

Abstract of the paper:

A study of all lawyer discipline cases in New York from mid-2008 through 2013 and many cases in earlier decades reveals that the system for lawyer discipline in New York is seriously deficient. Clients are not protected. The cases take far too long, often many years. Sanctions are dramatically inconsistent. There is no statewide effort to reconcile different sanctions in different courts. Many cases do not attempt to reconcile sanctions with those in similar cases from the same court. Secrecy is rampant. In the small number of cases where discipline is public, a prospective client cannot easily discover a lawyer's disciplinary record.