COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (Legal Newsline) – An Iowa state court judge won’t let an asbestos lawyer into his courtroom after defendants put a spotlight on her record of honesty.
Judge Richard Davidson on March 24 denied the pro hac vice motion – usually a formality for lawyers who want to practice in places in which they aren’t admitted – of attorney Jessica Dean, a partner at Dean Omar Branham Shirley in Dallas.
Davidson issued his decision following a hearing on whether Dean lied on her motion.
"You resubmitted your application voluntarily, and the Court notes that," Davidson said to Dean and her legal team. "And you've also assured the court that you will follow better practice as we've discussed in the future.
"I think you will understand how unacceptable the procedure that was followed by your firm concerning the pro hac vice application process."
Ford Motor Company and Honeywell International filed a motion Feb. 25 in Pottawattamie County court that would require Dean to resubmit her request to represent Clayton and Donna Rhodes in the court.
The motion says Dean – partner at Dean Omar Branham Shirley in Dallas – has been denied admission in another jurisdiction as well as having been sanctioned by a Minnesota court, despite representations on her application that neither happened.
And it’s not like the instances allegedly concealed are part of the ancient past. Dean was just sanctioned in July in Ramsey County, Minn.
She had violated an in limine order during the asbestos trial of client Jeffrey Richard Henry, leading to a mistrial. Defendants filed a motion for sanctions that sought their attorneys fees and costs.
The motion was granted – “Plaintiff’s counsel shall pay a fee and cost sanction of $77,996.80,” the judge ruled. But when filling out the pro hac vice application in the Iowa case, she answered “no” when asked if she had ever been held formally in contempt or otherwise sanctioned in the last five years for disobedience to the court’s rules or orders.
She also said she hadn’t been refused pro hac vice status in any other court, but Ford and Honeywell say that happened in 2015 in Connecticut.
“In the Reed case, Ms. Dean attested in her supporting affidavit that she had never been admitted pro hac vice in Connecticut before, when in fact, she had previously tried a case in the same courtroom,” the motion says.
Dean claimed her error in that case was made in not looking at the application close enough. In the Iowa case, she said she's "lost much sleep" about the misrepresentations in her motion and fired someone because of it.
"And so when we first looked at this, I remember my initial instinct being how did I miss this?" she said. "I can't believe I missed this. And then I read every email. I didn't see it. Then I looked at the application. That's not my signature.
"And then we went to the staff person who did send it in and asked, when did you send this and do you recall the training on this Connecticut thing, and then and then.
"(W)hat is unsettling about all this other than putting this court in this situation is that was a huge learning experience."
Dean talked about attorneys in her firm not signing the pro hac motions and not realizing she needed to tell employees they couldn't sign for them. It was that issue that led Dean to fire the employee who signed them.
"I've got a solution," the judge told her. "How about drafting the application yourself and reviewing it yourself and then signing it? It wouldn't take probably five minutes..."
Davidson said the remedial measures taken by Dean's firm didn't go far enough when he rejected her motion.
"I'm not taking any pleasure in this, because I want to do what all of us are in this profession to do (which) is for you and opposing counsel to appear before me, be zealous advocates, present your cases well, brief them well and put some hard work on my lap," he said.
"And I don't want to make this some huge global issue, but it's important that we pare it down to how important the fundamentals are in the practice of law, just like in baseball."