In the Matter of Druce, Proc. No. D2014-13 (OED Sept. 5, 2014), a practitioner admitted to neglecting matters entrusted to him by not preventing his non-lawyer assistant from cutting and pasting a digital version of the lawyer’s signature onto petitions, fabricating emails to the Office, doctoring postcards to show receipt by the Office of papers, falsifying Express Mail labels, and backdating certificates, among other things. The lawyer did not know of the conduct, and in fact the non-lawyer assistant kept the information from the lawyer. The lawyer agreed he had not adequately supervised the non-lawyer.
Wow. One might think that the attorney was at least partly victimized by the assistant, but this misconduct appears to have been systematic, suggesting that there was something wrong with the firm’s system.
I say baloney. Mr. Druce the victim? What about the clients?
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