Shillelagh-Brandishing Potty Mouth Loses Law License

While Gmail’s new “Undo” feature can save you from an all-too-hasty click, it cannot save you from your own stupidity.

On January 7, the Louisiana Hearing Committee recommended one fiery lawyer’s permanent disbarment after determining he “had to be admonished for brandishing about his shillelagh, his action clearly inappropriate for a disciplinary proceeding.” The lawyer had been suspended from practice in Louisiana on an interim basis since March 2009.

When the court suspended his law license, the lawyer riposted  by calling them a “bunch of pigs,” “gutless dogs,” and referred to the chief justice with a “sexual and offensive nickname” we can only conclude is too heinous to even include in the hearing report.

A week later, the lawyer sent another email to Disciplinary Counsel Ad Hoc denying the use of racially disparaging terms all the while “including many such terms along with other offensive terms” in the email. The same day, the lawyer he “notified Disciplinary Counsel Ad Hoc that he was a “pimp”, a “puppet”, an “Uncle Tom”, and an “OREO.””

In his next email, the lawyer explained “I Just Can’t Help Myself” then “launched into a string of racially offensive and obscene terms.”

It didn’t stop there.

On April 15, 2009, at 3.25 p.m., Respondent advised by email he had developed yet another nickname for Disciplinary Counsel Ad Hoc. This nickname was intended to be equally offensive. Later, at 5:27 p.m., Respondent offered by email to substitute a new offensive nickname for the prior offensive nickname.

On April 26, 2009, Respondent emailed Disciplinary Counsel Ad Hoc to advise him that Respondent was thinking of him and used a string of racially offensive and obscene terms to communicate his message.

The poor behavior continued with emails referring to opposing counsel in conflicting precedent as “SCUM” and “VERMIN”—and a judge as a “BIG GORILLA” who was attempting to accomplish “INSANITY.”

Comparing him to a “child who is sorry he got caught but not sorry for the infraction,” the committee found that the lawyer had committed numerous ethics rule violations and recommended permanent disbarment.

Not all jobs let you speak as boisterously as Donald Trump. Lawyering is one of them.

Featured image: “Man in shirt and tie sticking his tongue out and making the letter L” from Shutterstock.

Shillelagh-Brandishing Potty Mouth Loses Law License was originally published on Lawyerist.com.