NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Legal Newsline) - An attorney who had his law license suspended over allegations he intimidated courtroom opponents lost his bid to disqualify the judge hearing an unrelated sanctions motion, after a Tennessee appeals court ruled there was no reason to question the judge’s impartiality.
Brian Manookian represented a plaintiff in a medical malpractice suit whose case was dismissed by Judge Kelvin Jones. When he dismissed the underlying malpractice suit, Judge Jones retained jurisdiction over a sanctions motion against Manookian based on allegations he misrepresented whether he had retained a medical expert in the case or was familiar with the expert’s opinions.
The judge ordered the expert to be deposed, but on Dec. 17, before the deposition had taken place, Manookian filed a complaint with the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct accusing the judge of “various alleged misdeeds which were wholly unrelated to Mr. Manookian personally,” the Tennessee Court of Appeals found in a March 4 decision.
By that time Manookian no longer represented the plaintiff in the malpractice suit, having temporarily lost his license to practice law in 2019 after bar officials found he had tried to intimidate the client of opposing counsel in another case and sent another lawyer a picture of that lawyer’s wife with personal information and a photo of their home.
Manookian followed up his complaint with a motion to disqualify Judge Jones from the sanctions action, which the judge denied on Jan. 14. In that order, the judge said Manookian was “neither a party nor an attorney” in the underlying case and there was “no reasonable appearance of bias” to disqualify him. Defense lawyers called it a “strategic maneuver to manufacture a conflict of interest,” and urged the judge to order the deposition of the medical expert.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals granted an order for the deposition on Feb. 18. In a follow-up decision, it rejected Manookian’s disqualification request, saying he filed it after making a complaint over allegations that were “completely divorced of any relation to Mr. Manookian himself or matter pending before the trial court.”
“The judicial disqualification standards do not require recusal simply because the person seeking recusal has filed some type of complaint against the judge,” the appeals court ruled, in an opinion by Judge Arnold B. Goldin. “The concern with strictly requiring recusal in such circumstances, of course, is that it could foster abuse of the judicial system by encouraging people to judge-shop and manufacture recusals.”
The appeals court did question the trial judge’s statement that Manookian wasn’t a party to the sanctions action. While the judge didn’t explicitly deny the disqualified lawyer standing, it would be a mistake to say he wasn’t a party to the sanctions action against him, the appeals court said.