The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will not be blocking the release of the Ted Stevens report, reports The Wall Street Journal.
To refresh your recollection, the 500-page report deals with the 2008 corruption case against the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.
As attorney Leonard Suchanek found out, biting off more than you can chew may come back to bite you in your wallet.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Suchanek must disgorge a portion of his fees paid by a client because of his violations of the ethical rule against current-client conflicts.
There are many milestones in an attorney’s career that he or she can proudly brag about. Being the first attorney ever to receive a lifetime ban by the Securities and Exchange Commission because of ethical violations is surely not one of them.
Commercial litigator Steven Altman hasn’t tried to get the acknowledgement off his record without effort, however. But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hampered his efforts to overturn the ban after it denied his request to review the agency’s decision on Friday.
“The Commission was entitled to rely on Altman’s knowledge of and duty to conform to the New York Bar disciplinary rules,” Judge Rogers wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had an uncharacteristically busy day last week, releasing eleven opinions on Friday. Out of the many interesting holdings from the day's bounty comes the appeal of civil contempt findings against the two Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys involved in the late Sen. Ted Stevens' prosecution.
The two attorneys, William M. Welch and Brenda K. Morris, were held in civil contempt by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan for violating a court order to turn over documents to Stevens' defense team.
Now, what kind of contempt they were held in became the issue, and the case became a primer in the difference between civil and criminal contempt.
