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LEGAL NEWSLINE

Friday, March 29, 2024

Dallas firm withdraws from asbestos cases in South Carolina after mishaps draw judges' attention

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CHARLESTON, S.C. (Legal Newsline) – A Texas asbestos lawyer who was trying to explain why she failed to alert judges in other states about past disciplinary actions has instead chosen to withdraw from some of her South Carolina cases.

As a judge decided whether Jessica Dean, of Dean Omar Branham Shirley in Dallas, would be permitted to practice in a Charleston state court, Dean instead recently withdrew her motion seeking that approval.

The withdrawal followed a dustup in Iowa, where defendants pointed out Dean’s pro hac vice motion – a usually routine step that allows lawyers to practice in states where they are not members of the bar – omitted sanctions in Minnesota and a pro hac vice refusal in Connecticut.

In a March 24 hearing, Iowa judge Richard Davidson accepted Dean’s apology but still refused to grant her pro hac vice motion.

Dean said a paralegal at her firm prepared her incorrect motions and signed her name without notifying her. Other lawyers at the firm have said the same, and the employee has been fired.

"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.

Some of her motions also claimed 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.

Dean and her co-workers have filed at least eight notices of withdrawal of pro hac vice motions recently. Dean has filed three of them, but no reason is given on the motions for withdrawal.

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