CHARLESTON, S.C. (Legal Newsline) – Shunned from an Iowa courtroom for turning in paperwork that ignored a history of disciplinary measures against her, a Dallas asbestos lawyer now waits to see if she’ll be allowed to continue working in one of her firm’s preferred jurisdictions.
A new motion to be admitted to practice in Charleston, S.C., comes clean about omissions in Jessica Dean’s previous request, which left out certain facts brought to light recently by companies she sued in Iowa.
In a March 24 hearing, Iowa judge Richard Davidson accepted Dean’s apology but still refused to grant her pro hac vice motion – a usually routine filing that lets a lawyer practice in a jurisdiction in which he or she is not admitted to the bar.
Dean said an employee at her firm – Dean Omar Branham Shirley – prepared the Iowa motion and signed her name without notifying her and left out a history that includes sanctions in July in Minnesota and a Connecticut judge refusing her pro hac vice motion in 2015 because it was inaccurate.
"I think you will understand how unacceptable the procedure that was followed by your firm concerning the pro hac vice application process,” Judge Davidson told her in the Iowa case.
Ford Motor Company and Honeywell International brought the issue to light in February in a request for Dean to resubmit her motion.
Last year in Ramsey County, Minn., Dean 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 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 had also said she hadn’t been refused pro hac vice status in any other court, but Dean has since admitted that happened in 2015 in Connecticut. In that application, she answered that she had never been granted pro hac vice status in that court in Bridgeport, but she had been several years earlier.
So the Connecticut judge refused her application.
These mistakes were also on her application to represent the estate of Mary B. McBrayer in South Carolina, a jurisdiction garnering notice for alleged preferential treatment of plaintiffs and their lawyers, like Dean.
Dean’s firm has been filing cases in South Carolina for five years and has a reputation for seeking punishments against defendants over discovery disputes.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Jean Toal presides over the asbestos docket and will now decide whether Dean will continue working in her court or whether she will punish a plaintiff like she does defendants.
Noted in the most recent “Judicial Hellholes” report by the American Tort Reform Association was Toal’s decision to strike all of a bankrupt defendant’s pleadings in three separate cases as sanctions.
Dean says two other South Carolina motions contained the omissions when she wrote the state’s Office of Bar Admissions in late March.
“It recently came to my attention that one of our paralegals filed pro hac vice applications without having the attorney of record review them for accuracy,” Dean said. “This paralegal also submitted and/or filed pro hac vice documents by signing the lawyers name without permission.
“This person is no longer working with the firm and applications are being reviewed.”
Her letter says staff members involved with preparing these motions have been retrained. Her April 2 refiling of her motion noted the breakdown in her office that led to the controversy.
Time will tell if Toal is more receptive to her explanation than was the Iowa judge, Davidson.
“I’ve got a solution,” he told her at the hearing. “How about drafting the application yourself and reviewing it yourself and then signing it? It wouldn’t take probably five minutes…”