As a supervising attorney, you’d be opening up a pretty big can of worms for yourself if you tried this. You’re not just responsible for your own conduct - you’re responsible for ensuring that everyone under your supervision is following the professional rules of your jurisdiction as well. (For example, you need to make sure that paralegals and secretaries aren’t divulging privileged information).
If an ordinary paralegal under your supervision suddenly decided to post a boatload of privileged information to Wikileaks, you might well get away without any sanction from the state bar; if you could show that you’d impressed the importance of confidentiality upon your employees, and you’d done the normal due-dilligence to make sure there weren’t any obvious red flags to suggest your employees couldn’t be trusted to obey those rules. If you’ve done all you reasonably could to keep the people under your supervision from violating professional rules, the Bar is likely to understand that. But I suspect they’d be much less understanding if you brought on someone with a very well-known and public history of flouting the rules, and this person then proceeded to flout them.
The question of what a disbarred attorney could legally do is going to vary a bit from state to state - but it’s a safe bet that no practicing attorney could sensibly hire him or her, absent very unusual circumstances.
Apart from private reprimands (which is the least serious sanction the disciplinary board can impose) it’s all public record. In my state, they are published just like court decisions are published. Specifically for Virginia, that means they’d be published in sets called “reporters” with the reporter that handles Virginia (as well as West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) called the “South Eastern Reporter.” A case cite might look like:
Gunter v. Virginia State Bar, 385 SE 2d 597 (Va. 1989)
Virginia Supreme Court cases have been published since at least 2000 on-line, so you can probably look at recent ones at no cost.
When you are a Law Students and in the early parts of your professional training (especially the later) your need to act according to the highest standards is hammered into you. You are told many times of the consequences of failing to meet them…in some detail, usually with copious examples from real life. So its not just a theoretical exersize.
Debarment or disbarment or striking off means that you are no longer authorized to be a lawyer. This pretty much cuts out what you can do to zero theoretically and a minimum practically.
It would not be irrelevant. By acting as a lawyer without having a license you are committing an offence. Regulators will NOT take this lightly and you will be punished. Not to mention ruin chances of any restoration.
It takes years of training to become a lawyer. The reason for this is that lawyers have the rights to undertake a whole truckload of work that laymen cannot. As a result, when you do a said work, you have to show that you are a lawyer. Not just Courtwork. Every legal notice I send for example has my name, my title (Advocate High Courts) and usually my CC No (Court Counsel number). My office address has to be on the stationary and is registered with the Bar Association. If I ever get debarred (God forbid!) then I cannot use them. So my choice is either to hide the fact I am a lawyer (and not get entertained) or not hide that and get the regulator on my neck.
Therefore a debarred lawyer will not be able to do most of the things which are the bread and butter of lawyers or even things which are ancillary to general work. Drawing up papers for a new company (to use your example)means dealing with regulators (company regulators that is) and you cannot do that if you are noyt a lawyer. Work as consultant might be possible, but if you have been debarred most other lawyers will avoid you anyway so it will have to be special contacts.
At best you might get away with low level stuff where you don’t have to use your name directly, such as drafting basic contracts and agreements. That will however be contingent on the regulator deciding to ignore you, which is only going to happen if you are doing very small scale stuff. And they still might not ignore you.
Its not “embared” its “Admitted” (N America mostly) or “Called” (Commonwealth mostly).
But that was my question - what is “acting like a lawyer” for the purposes of committing an offense.
Obviously, you can’t appear in court, or file documents that need to be filed by a lawyer.
Obviously you can’t advertise your services and sit beside someone being interrogated by the police.
I assume whatever you do, attorney-client privilege does not attach.
But if non-law-firm Cheatem Harde Inc. decides to hire you to review and draft contracts, draw up threatening notices, file property transfers, mortgage documents, research precedents and write opinions, tell HR how fine to the line they can act cheating the employees, etc - presumably stuff anyone or a paralegal can do - then that’s not illegal.
Would a fresh-out-of-school lawyer be in an ethicaldilemma if he’s handed valid court documents, told “read this and then file it woth the court with your name on it, or quit”?
I guess, what specifically is a lawyer allowed to do that a well-read amateur is not?
(Not that anyone would hire these Prenda bozos based on (a) apparent ethics and (b) ultimate track record in their chosen specialty).
Admitted is generally used for Australian (there may be some difference from state to state) lawyers, but barristers still generally refer to their first call to bar rather than their admission date (as many were admitted/practiced as solicitors prior to becoming barristers).
Reinstatement varies by state. Some almost never allow it; some allow it almost as a matter of course after some period of years. One journal article suggests that Mass. used to be quite strict, but a broadly-worded ruling in the 1975 reinstatement of Alger Hiss has led to a broader tendency toward reinstatement.
FWIW, in 2000 the Boston Globe determined that 266 lawyers had been disbarred in Massachusetts since 1990, 25 had sought reinstatement, and 19 of those had been successful. So, if a disbarred lawyer in Mass. wants back in, it looks like he or she would have about a 75% chance of success. I note anecdotally that in 2010, a Mass. lawyer who was disbarred in 2000 after pleading guilty to insurance fraud was reinstated on the basis of having successfully rehabilitated himself by “participating in charitable activities, coaching youth sports teams and being a stay-at-home father,” so the standards seem, well, possibly a bit forgiving these days.
It’s not clear to me how these numbers intersect with one another, however; Mass. imposes an eight-year wait before applying for reinstatement, so most of those disbarred after 1990 would not have been eligible before 2000. Presumably, too, there may have been some lawyers disbarred before 1990 who sought reinstatement thereafter, and it’s not clear that those were counted.
Yes that is generally true in New Zealand as well. Technically we are called to the Bar but most people refer to being admitted. Incidentally although we still have barristers, everyone is currently admitted as a barrister and solicitor - you can elect to be a barrister sole once in practise. Barristers can work from day 1 but lawyers must work for somebody for 3 years before putting their plate up.
Sadly in NZ we are now all called lawyers (by statute) and I’ve given up describing myself as a solicitor. It isn’t a big deal, just another example of society dumbing down deep tradition and the colour of the past.
You do make a good point and it is certainly possible for a disbarred or non-called lawyer to do technical legal work. The thing is, a law clerk or para-legal can do the same job and be much easier to employ. Being a boss and going to the bottom of the heap is not easy for anyone.
Contracts. Drafting and review should be fine unless he is sending out opinions and advice to clients. As that is done for all but the simplest contracts.
Draw up notices. All legal notices are sent from lawyers and have to be signed by whoever drew them up. So no.
File property transfers or mortgage documents. Aside from the parties themselves most jurisdiction limit who can file or execute such documents and processes on there behalf. Persons who can include estate agents and lawyers. So again, no.
Research and draft opinions. Research yes. Opinions have to be signed by a lawyer. No. He could write internal memos I suppose which is converted into an opinion, indeed that’s quite common, a junior counsel writes a memo which is converted into senior counsel opinions for delivery to clients.
I really cannot emphasis the difference between a job and a vocation strongly enough. The law and medicine are vocations - they define a person at their essence. It means waking up in the middle of the night in horror that you forgot something. It means your family becoming a distant second. It means thinking in a very specific way 24 hours a day and helping people by reflex good or bad.
Thank you for that generous comment Scion of Elendil. Acknowledgement combined with specific disagreement - its a pleasure to read a refined response.
When I wrote the post I realised that waking up in the middle of the night is not a condition confined to the rarefied professions of law and medicine, but couldn’t think of another image. Many many people in all walks of life suffer these small hour conurbations. Doubtless there are engineers who awake in the dark hours to the thought of a bridge collapsing.
I suppose the difference is that both law and medicine are intimately human occupations. Both have a deep foundation in trust and confidentiality to the extent that its impossible to remove ones-self from empathy for the patient/client. In theory we are all dispassionate and some practitioners are but most…most are simply human and assume the worries handed across the desk.
In Florida, complaints and investigative documentation are not public record. However, if the Bar files a petition with the Supreme Court to sanction the attorney, that is public record, as is any subsequent pleading filed in the case.
You can view it by looking at the attorney’s Bar profile and clicking on disciplinary history.