December 3rd, 2014

“& Associates” as an Ethical Violation Gets a Courtroom Visit

Ethics-700970-774132Five years ago, when Sonia Sotomayor came before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation, she released a questionnaire that gave her legal history, and she revealed that she once had a firm called “Sotomayor & Associates.” The problem? There were no associates.

Oops. I wrote the piece up within a few hours of the document’s release, describing it as a one of the less serious pieces of misleading advertising that take place, but a violation nonetheless.

And there the post sat for a couple weeks until the Washington Times picked it up in an editorial. And then the New York Times did a big story on it (without attribution to me, thank you very much) a month after I did, complete with White House response.

But the most curious part of the episode was the White House claim that this wasn’t an ethical violation, raising the issue from an “oops” to a full-blown kerfluffle. They actually paraded out a defense of the clearly misleading practice by offering a written analysis by Hal R. Lieberman, a former disciplinary committee chief counsel in New York:

“Neither bar opinions nor cases to date have held that it was misleading for a sole practitioner to use the name ‘and Associates’ in such private communications…In fact, in the early 1980s, no rule prohibited the use of ‘and Associates’ in these circumstances and the only authority regarding the use of ‘and Associates’ in an advertising context was advisory, not mandatory, and thus not readily enforceable.”

Lieberman was dead wrong, in my opinion, and I called this a lousy defense.

Well, the answer is now clear, for any lawyers that thought they could get away with puffing out their firm names to make them look bigger than they actually are. Yesterday the Appellate Division, First Department censured a lawyer over the use of “& Associates” when he had no associates; he was a solo practitioner (Matter of Cardenas).

To be sure, this was the least of the transgressions committed in the censure that took place, with the big issue being the apparent deliberate commingling of funds. For the non-lawyers that may be reading, that means the lawyer borrowed money for his own use from an attorney escrow fund where it was supposed to sit segregated.

But mixed into the panoply of charges was this clear and unmistakable bit, for violating:

Rule 7.5(b) (using business cards and letterhead listing his law firm as “Cardenas & Associates,” when, during the period at issue, he did not employ any associates)

It is highly doubtful a lawyer would be censured for this alone. But the rule is nevertheless clear. It is misleading to call your firm “& Associates” when there are no associates. And if the White House or any other authority tries to tell you otherwise, there is now a decision to point to.

 

 

July 9th, 2009

Prior Sotomayor Document Says "Sotomayor & Associates" Was NOT Law Related — Updated


The mystery surrounding “Sotomayor & Associates” gets curiouser and curiouser. Still trying to figure out exactly what Judge Sotomayor was doing with this firm she ran from her home between 1983-1986, I dug into her questionnaire from her 1997 appointment to the Second Circuit, now available at the Clinton Library. (Box 0001, Folder 00003)

In that document, she gives her non-judicial legal experience as a state prosecutor (August, 1979 to March 1984) and as a civil litigator at Pavia & Harcourt (April 1984 – October 1992). There is no mention of a solo practice law firm under the name “Sotomayor & Associates.” (See question 10, page 4).

But then she adds in “Sotomayor & Associates” in response to a request for non-legal positions (Page 8, paragraph 16):

Have you ever been engaged in any occupation, business or profession other than the practice of law or holding judicial or public office? If so, give details, including dates.

No, except advising and consulting family and friends as Sotomayor & Associates from 1983 to 1986.

So, was this a law related business as indicated in her SCOTUS questionnaire (p. 143) or a non-law business as set forth in her 2nd Circuit questionnaire?

And why aren’t the answers consistent (especially for someone described as “meticulous”)?

This little research project of mine, by the way, stems from little more than wanting to know what kinds of clients she had represented in private practice. Basically, I wanted to know if they were large corporations or regular people. I had discussed this a bit prior to Sotomayor’s nomination in The SCOTUS Nominee and the Tissue Box Test.

But every time I take a peak at something related to “Sotomayor & Associates” I seem to end out with more questions than answers.

Updated: The New York Times now has dug up documents from Judge Sotomayor’s 1991 appointment to the District Court that gives more regarding “Sotomayor & Associates,” which appears contrary to the way the White House was downplaying it. The Times article says:

But documents released by the library of former President George H. W. Bush this week give the sense that White House, in 1991, when Judge Sotomayor was 37 years old, had a more formal view of the law practice as administration officials in Washington considered her nomination to the federal bench that year. [More at this link]

Links to this post:

blawg review #220
welcome to blawg review #220, rounding up some highlights of the past week from around the legal blogosphere. it’s my second time hosting it here at overlawyered, a blog that as its name implies maintains a certain critical distance
posted by Walter Olson @ July 13, 2009 3:40 AM

 

July 9th, 2009

"Sotomayor & Associates" Under Senate Investigation ( A preview of 6 potential issues)

I was called yesterday by a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s minority’s legal staff regarding my postings on “Sotomayor & Associates” and potential ethics issues, and the subsequent New York Times article regarding the firm.

It probably comes as no surprise that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s small, solo practice is being investigated. The committee is not, after all, a potted plant. And this little law firm that Judge Sotomayor ran out of her Brooklyn home from 1983-1986 was unknown to the world until she submitted answers to an extensive questionnaire on June 4th.

What follows are the five issues that I believe they are exploring, based upon my conversation (plus one more from TaxProf), as well as some thoughts on why these items may well be the focus of some questions despite other matters being significantly more important:

1. Was she permitted by the District Attorney’s office to have a side practice while still an ADA? In the Times article, long-time New York DA Robert Morgenthau said yes, though others have said no.

2. Did her new firm Pavia & Harcourt permit its lawyers to have an outside practice? As per the Times:

“It is news to me,” Mr. Pavia said. He said she likely cleared the outside work with her direct supervisor, who is now dead.

3. Did Judge Sotomayor run her private clients’ matters through the conflicts department of the new firm (or of the DA’s office, while she was still there)? Even a simple house closing with a mortgage could conceivably be an issue if the DA or the firm had matters regarding the lending institution. A conflict check might be needed. While her direct supervisor at Pavia may have passed on, one would assume there would be a record of potential conflicts submissions if the firm was of any great size at the time.

4. Sotomayor & Associates was a clearly misleading name since there were no associates. Will this matter? If she never had stationery, and simply put the name on her tax returns as the NYT article suggests, it is likely moot. But if she did have stationary of any kind, it is an issue of minor interest. It’s a minor interest, of course, only if she admits to having screwed up. But she’ll get kicked around but good if she had letterhead and tries to claim (as the White House has suggested) that the ethics opinion forbidding such conduct was only “advisory.”

5. Was Sotomayor & Associates registered with New York’s Office of Court Administration? This is a mandatory periodic filing for all attorneys in the state. The Times wrote the following on the subject, but I believe they were wrong on the requirement:

She never incorporated Sotomayor & Associates or registered it as a business in Manhattan or Brooklyn, where she then lived, according to public records, though she was not required to do so.

In fact, it appears that attorneys were required to register with the Office of Court Administration, unless there was a rule change during those years. The registration form used today requires the name and addresses (plural on the form) of the law offices be given to our court administrators every two years. It reads as follows:

(e) The registration statement shall be on a form provided by the Chief Administrator and shall include the following information, attested to by affirmation:

(1) name of attorney; (2) date of birth; (3) name when admitted to the bar; (4) law school from which degree granted; (5) year admitted to the bar; (6) judicial department of admission to the bar; (7) office addresses (including department); (8) home address; (9) business telephone number; and (10) social security number.

Is there a difference between the forms used today and those used back then? Yes. Now there is more information required. But the requirement for all addresses is apparently the same.

How do I know what the mid-80’s rule was? Because I pulled out my own registration form, which has an effective date of January 1, 1986. I saved everything regarding my admission because my bar exam results from the summer of 1985 had been infamously lost, making me a tad neurotic on the subject.

So unless there was a change in that particular rule from 1983 to 1986 — and this is possible since my form was dated 1/86 indicating that something changed; you can see the back of the form here: /OCA-Reg-Form1986.pdf — Judge Sotomayor messed up her registration requirements. What does that mean? Here you go:

Failure by any attorney to comply with the provisions of this section shall result in referral for disciplinary action by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court pursuant to section 90 of the Judiciary Law.

It therefore seems possible, unless there was a change in the rules from 1983-1986, that Judge Sotomayor was practicing law out of her home without being properly registered there. While that would be wrong, it isn’t a particularly big deal if she was registered elsewhere and her registration fee paid, as was no doubt the case. You need to do a helluva lot more than that to get in trouble.

But Judge Sotomayor should nevertheless be prepared to answer that question about the lack of proper registration. This is especially true since the Times article appears to have made an error regarding the necessity of registration. I suspect that error was based on information that came from the White House or the expert they retained to review the whole Sotomayor & Associates thing. (Alternatively, I’m wrong and there was a change in that narrow window of time.)

We have, therefore, a smattering of small issues. But small errors can become bigger ones when people try to fight them instead of simply acknowledging obvious mistakes. Given the lousy defense previously offered from the White House’s designated expert on the subject of “& Associates,” there is reason to be concerned.

So why is her moonlighting solo practice important? Because her extensive legal background is, from the standpoint of most of the Senators’ constituents, a morass of legal nuances that lawyers love to debate but which the rest of the public is generally ill-equipped to quickly digest (summary here). But easy ethical issues like those mentioned above work well in a televised setting. And that makes it fodder for high-profile hearings where camera-hungry politicians hope to poke and prod and score the best quotes for the evening news.

In sum, Judge Sotomayor should be prepared to use the phrase, “I messed up,” instead of “There was no controlling legal authority” to avoid these issues. And if she is as “wise” as she says she is, that is what she will do.
————————–
Elsewhere is item #6: At Paul Caron‘s TaxProf, guest blogger Linda Galler speculates that the law practice might have simply existed so that a home office could be written off on the tax returns.

Links to this post:

blawg review #220
welcome to blawg review #220, rounding up some highlights of the past week from around the legal blogosphere. it’s my second time hosting it here at overlawyered, a blog that as its name implies maintains a certain critical distance

posted by Walter Olson @ July 13, 2009 3:40 AM

why eric turkewitz still matters
with regard to the issue of giving credit for discovering the “sotomeyor & associates” issue, eric turkewitz comments: something might be in the public domain, but it if is buried in a box of other documents, someone still has to go
posted by Mark Draughn @ July 09, 2009 11:48 AM

 

July 7th, 2009

Sotomayor Offers Lousy Defense To Ethics Charge Over Firm Name


It’s been bugging me since I saw it in the New York Times this morning: Sonia Sotomayor gave a lousy defense to an ethics charge over the name of her solo law practice, “Sotomayor & Associates.”

To backtrack a bit, she had a home office that overlapped her tenures at the District Attorney’s office and her stint at Pavin & Harcourt back in 1983-1986. Despite it being a solo practice, she called it “Sotomayor & Associates,” which is misleading since the Times has now confirmed what I had guessed at a month ago: That there were no actual associates.

Here is the defense, as laid out by an expert that the White House apparently retained after my posting appeared: The authority for prohibiting the misleading firm name was merely “advisory.”

That defense is — as defenses go when you are awaiting confirmation to the highest court in the land — just awful. I mean not just a little bit bad, but truly wretched to the point of embarrassing. From the Times article:

White House officials disagreed that the use of the name was a misstep, and they offered a written analysis by Hal R. Lieberman, a former disciplinary committee chief counsel in New York.

“Neither bar opinions nor cases to date have held that it was misleading for a sole practitioner to use the name ‘and Associates’ in such private communications,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “In fact, in the early 1980s, no rule prohibited the use of ‘and Associates’ in these circumstances and the only authority regarding the use of ‘and Associates’ in an advertising context was advisory, not mandatory, and thus not readily enforceable.”

After I wrote my initial post just hours after Judge Sotomayor released her questionnaire responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I dug a little further. I found an ethics advisory opinion from 1973 from the New York State Bar Association that was directly on point. It’s in the comments part of that post, but it is worth reprinting here since this has now become an issue:

Opinion 286 — 3/16/73 (1-73)
New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics
March 16, 1973

QUESTION

May an attorney who employs two or more “associates” use firm name “John Smith and Associates”?

OPINION

While not the usual form, there is nothing improper in the use of the firm name “John Smith and Associates”, provided that the lawyer or the firm has in fact two or more lawyer employees so that the name is not misleading. EC 2-10; EC 2-13; ABA 318 (1967); cf. EC 2-11; N.Y. State 45 (1967). However, where there are other partners in addition to those indicated in the firm name, it could be considered misleading to add, after the firm name the words “and Associates”, unless on the letterhead the names of all the partners and, separately, the names of the associates are shown. (ABA 310 (1963).)

So what should Sotomayor have done back in 1983 when she had her own small firm operating out of her home? She had these choices, as I see it:

OK, what is past is past.What should she do now? While I hesitate from my tiny little perch in cyberspace to give advice to a Supreme Court nominee, I’m going to do it anyway in the event this comes up in the confirmation hearings or in other news articles.

  1. Forget that crap from Hal Lieberman about there being no rule and the ethics opinion being merely advisory. You are not before a court of law but the court of public opinion. The rules said you can’t mislead. You said you had associates and you didn’t. End of story. You screwed that up.
  2. Admit that you screwed it up. Don’t try to lawyer your way out of it. Offer up the simple explanation: You were still in the D.A.’s office at the time and this was a small law practice that only a few relatives and friends even knew about, and you never even gave the name any thought. Yes, it was wrong. But it was done out of inadvertence.

The mistake was minor in the big scheme of things. If the ethics committee found out about it at the time it would have wagged its finger and said no-no, that’s misleading, please change it. That’s it.

Americans don’t expect saints on the bench. Humans are fallible. It’s OK to screw up once in awhile.

But don’t trot out lame excuses. Don’t try to lawyer your way out of this with being “advisory.” That is something that people won’t tolerate.

[Sotomayor tag now added for all Sotomayor posts]

Links to this post:

blawg review #220
welcome to blawg review #220, rounding up some highlights of the past week from around the legal blogosphere. it’s my second time hosting it here at overlawyered, a blog that as its name implies maintains a certain critical distance

posted by Walter Olson @ July 13, 2009 3:40 AM

Tax ‘Issues’ For Sotomayor?
There is some question as to if Sotomayor may have some tax ‘issue’ about to bubble to the surface. Sotomayor had a private law office she named “Sotomayor & Associates”, but there were no associates. There is nothing illegal about

posted by Andrew Berman @ July 08, 2009 6:15 PM

Two New Strikes against Judge Sotomayor
As a blog says, Sotomayor’s defense give for using the name “Sotomayor and Associates” for her solo practice is weak. It’s legalistic (that is, it evades the ethics question and makes it a question of rules) and it’s wrong.

posted by Eric Rasmusen @ July 08, 2009 4:24 PM

And it rolls in further, a tide of hypocrisy and
dumbass rising. Obama in Moscow: Along the way, you gave us a pretty good deal on Alaska. Thank you. D’OH!!! The man is a Laff Riot!!! That’s the way to “hit the Reset button”, Mr. President. Remind the Russians of perhaps the stupidest

posted by Firehand @ July 08, 2009 3:31 PM

taxprof: does judge sotomayor have a tax problem? update: related
taxprof: does judge sotomayor have a tax problem? update: related item here.

posted by Glenn Reynolds @ July 08, 2009 1:55 PM

sotomayor “and associates”
when practicing a bit of law on the side during her time with the manhattan da’s office and at a larger law firm, the nominee called her very small practice “sotomayor & associates” even though it had no lawyers but herself.

posted by Walter Olson @ July 08, 2009 7:20 AM

sotomayor & associates
[guest post by drj]. the new york times addresses sonia sotomayor’s legal practice in the 1980’s: “in her questionnaire, judge sotomayor says she was the “owner” of sotomayor & associates, which she described as a consulting business
posted by DRJ @ July 08, 2009 12:08 AM

 

July 7th, 2009

Welcome New Visitors: (NYT on Sotomayor & Associates, And On Failing to Credit Story Source)

It’s funny how one can be in the news without actually being in the news. As mentioned earlier today, the New York Times ran a story about “Sotomayor & Associates” and the fact that she didn’t have any actual associates. I wrote that story up back on June 4th, and it’s laid mostly dormant since then.

But when the Times failed to credit me with having found this item as they furthered the investigation, other bloggers took notice and the issue of journalistic ethics reared its head.

To my new readers (at least for a day), I welcome you. If you want to know more of the types of stuff I write about here, and whether this obscure little blog should be part of your RSS feed, you can skim this “best of” piece.

Welcome to readers of those that follow (and my thanks to their authors for the inbound links). I’ll update this later with further links should the story be of interest to others:

  • Scott Greenfield @ Simple Justice with a long and gracious post (Credit is a Two Way Street) that includes this lede:

    Judge Richard Posner recently suggested an extreme solution to the potential death of the newspaper. Using the argument that there’s no reason to buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, Posner urged the expansion of copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent.” In other words, burn blogs to save newspapers.

    But this assumes, as Posner does, that its only blogs that free-ride off the newsgathering efforts of “legitimate” media. While this is certainly the predominant flow, it’s not always the case, as was clear today when the New York Times published a story about Sonia Sotomayor’s foray into private practice under the name “Sotomayor and Associates.” It was a wonderful piece of investigative journalism, but for one detail. The news was unearthed not by the Times, but by blawger Eric Turkewitz at New York Personal Injury Attorney Blog…[more]

  • Prof David Wgner @ Ninomania:

    Did Sotomayor violate a well-established bar rule in calling her solo practice in 1983-6 “Sotomayor & Associates” when evidence suggests it was just herself helping family and friends via a home practice?

  • John Steele @ Legal Ethics Forum:

    A solo cannot describe his or her practice with the phrase “and Associates” if in fact there are no associates there. It’s false and misleading. [more]

  • Jim Lindgren @ Volokh Conspiracy: A multi-state look at the use of “and Associates” in the name of a solo practice
  • Walter Olson @ Point of Law:

    …the nominee called her very small practice “Sotomayor & Associates” even though it had no lawyers but herself. That would appear to be an infraction, if a minor one, of the relevant New York ethical rules.

  • Mark Draughn @ WindyPundit:

    Even if he got the idea from Turkewitz’s’ blog, he probably considers the idea public property because the primary source for the blog post—Sotomeyor’s questionnaire—is available to anyone, and Turkewitz doesn’t have any ownership of the story just because he wrote about it first. [Much more at On the Ethics of Sourcing For Bloggers and Journalists]

[New Sotomayor tag added for easy access to all Sotomayor posts]

Links to this post:

blawg review #220
welcome to blawg review #220, rounding up some highlights of the past week from around the legal blogosphere. it’s my second time hosting it here at overlawyered, a blog that as its name implies maintains a certain critical distance

posted by Walter Olson @ July 13, 2009 3:40 AM

sonia sotomayor “and associates”
[i’ve edited to make this tighter.] story here and here. eric turkewitz, a new york lawyer/blawger, broke the story. [then professor alberto bernabe, of the john marshall school of law, blogged about it.]
posted by John Steele @ July 07, 2009 2:48 PM