Start with the
Go here to have a look at the American Bar Association Model Standards converted into a questionnaire.
Here you will find Standards for the Prosecutoral Function
This site was set up to publicize bar grievances, to shine a light on a process that would otherwise be kept in strict secrecy by bar associations across the states. The plan is to post the grievance on this site as soon as it is created and before it has been filed so that anyone doing a search on the name of the person complained against will get a hit directly on the grievance. We will be implementing a place for the lawyer to respond to the grievance if s/he chooses.
By allowing lawyers to police lawyers, we have contributed to the horrendous decline of the profession. Few lawyers joined the profession so that they could become bottom feeding leaches. We created this mess by failing to adequately police the profession. Graduating lawyers enter a profession with the greatest of hope only to find a horrendously corrupt situation they did not create, but with looming student loans and the threat of having corrupt judges take their license on a whim, they are stuck in this corrupt system they did not create and cannot effectively change.
Absent effective checks and balances in the state bars and judicial conduct commissions, the judicial system has deteriorated to the point that the only people who have faith in the system are those who have never had to deal with it. The legal profession is the only licensed profession allowed to police itself. The results we have suffered are nothing more than reasonable people should expect.
The problem with judges is worse than with lawyers and to address this, we are setting up a sister site: Judicial Conduct.Com. Judges, by this total lack of oversight, seem to have elevated themselves to the status of royalty, in that they rendered themselves above the laws they are sworn to uphold and protect and lawyers feel this more than the public.
We are not saying that all judges are intentionally corrupt. We are saying that the good judges are trapped in a system driven by corruption and either go along to some degree or risk a corrupt system turning on them.
Things have gotten so bad that no lawyer in his right professional mind would dare vigorously defend your rights if in so doing there would be the slightest a chance of annoying a judge. Ask any lawyer, "If you do something to anger a judge, would a judge rule against your clients to get back at you? Every honest lawyer will tell you, "You darn right they will." Whether that is true or not, you can be sure your lawyer believes it is true.
If you file a grievance, you can be certain the state bar association will take your grievance and throw it in the trash. The bar send you a computer generated form letter showing that they found your grievance does not rise to the level of misconduct, no matter what you accuse the lawyer of or how well you document your allegation.
The state bars simply will not police their own. The only time a lawyer can expect to be disciplined by the bar is when a judge wants them disciplined and that is a good thing. If they were smart enough to at least give the semblance of taking your grievances seriously, then maybe their insurance companies would not deal so harshly with them.
Their malpractice carriers are well aware that the bar is nothing more than a public relations organization for lawyers and will do nothing to insure that the lawyer act with professional conscious. Because of this, the insurance carriers cannot gauge their level of risk by the number of valid bar grievances filed. So what are they to do? Well, they go by the numbers.
This is how it works: if an lawyer gets one bar grievance in his first year of practice, his insurance carrier will cancel his malpractice insurance immediately; two in any one year, no matter how many years of practice, they will cancel; three and they will cancel his law firms insurance.
Some people, however, do not want their personal information available on this site. This site will make the grievance available, but your contact information will not be on the grievance that is made public. Your name will so that the lawyer will know who is filing the grievance. I all fairness, the lawyer needs to be able to rebut your allegations if they so choose.
If you do not want your name displayed, do no use this site. This site will not be used as a place to abuse attorneys. We will not post anything about a lawyer without giving the lawyer opportunity to rebut. We will also send a copy of the complaint to the lawyer with instructions as to how s/he can post a rebuttal.