Lawyers Behaving Badly: 17 Disbarments, Strike-Offs and Sanctions

Three centuries of the legal profession caught by the one institution it cannot cross-examine — its own disciplinary record.

Every other special edition in this series is written from outside the guild. This one is not. The author has practised law for thirty years, which confers no authority to judge these men and women but does confer the standing to say what their conduct actually was, and to note that the profession's characteristic vice is not greed. Greed is universal and boring. The vice peculiar to lawyers is the belief that a life spent learning where the rules bend has taught them that the rules bend for everyone — including, at the necessary moment, for the man reading them aloud. What follows is drawn almost entirely from disbarment orders, strike-off judgments, sanctions rulings and tribunal findings: the profession's own record of the profession, written by people obliged to be precise. The blade here aims at the practitioner and never at the client, who in nearly every case was the one holding the bill.

The Lord Chancellor Who Sold the Offices Holding Other People's Money — 1718–1725

Thomas Parker, first Earl of Macclesfield, presided over the Court of Chancery while selling appointments to the Masterships within it — offices whose holders had custody of the suitors' funds. He surrendered the Great Seal on 4 January 1725. The Commons impeached him; the Lords tried him over ten days that May and found him guilty of corruption. He was fined £30,000 and committed to the Tower until it was paid, remaining some two months until wealthy friends met the sum. Parliament then passed Acts for the relief of Chancery suitors. He returned to the Lords in 1727 and had his Crown pension restored in 1729.

The verdict: He sold the offices that held other people's money, was fined a fortune, served two months, and was quietly back in the chamber inside two years — the profession's capacity to reabsorb its own is not a modern invention.

Source: The History of Parliament

The President Who Tried to Resign From the Bar Instead of Admitting Anything — 1976

"The respondent, formerly the President of the United States, is an attorney, admitted to the practice of law in the State of New York on December 5, 1963." So opens the order. Richard Nixon declined to furnish affidavits the court requested, submitted a resignation from the Bar that omitted the required acknowledgment of misconduct, and then simply stopped participating; proceedings were set before the Referee for 13 April and default was noted. The court found he had improperly concealed and encouraged others to conceal evidence relating to unlawful acts, among them the entry into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

The verdict: Offered the profession's standard escape hatch, he declined it on the single condition attached — that he say out loud what he had done — and so was expelled rather than admit it.

Source: New York Appellate Division, First Department — Matter of Nixon, 53 A.D.2d 178 (1976)

Roy Cohn and the Codicil Signed by a Hand That Could Not Move — 1986

On four charges the Appellate Division disbarred Roy M. Cohn: concealing findings on a bar application, an unrepaid client loan, violating an escrow order, and the Rosenstiel codicil. In a Miami hospital room Cohn had presented a codicil naming himself co-executor to a dying, almost comatose man of eighty-four. A handwriting expert found "no legible characters of any nature" in the resulting signature. An attendant recalled hearing the words, "We will help you, Lew, to sign." The Hearing Panel had recommended exoneration on that charge. The court reversed it — "The facts speak for themselves" — and found Cohn's own testimony untruthful and misleading.

The verdict: He had spent forty years persuading everyone that the rules bent around him, and the singular achievement of the opinion is that it declines to be impressed.

Source: New York Appellate Division, First Department — Matter of Cohn, 118 A.D.2d 15 (1986)

The Chancery Silk Who Auctioned Nothing, and the Copyright Firm That Auctioned Shame — 2013

John Steele, Paul Hansmeier and Paul Duffy formed offshore shells holding nothing but pornographic copyrights, harvested addresses from file-sharing networks, and posted settlement demands priced, as the court put it, just below the cost of a bare-bones defence. Judge Otis Wright found they had forged a copyright assignment in the name of Steele's groundskeeper. He awarded $81,319.72, deliberately doubled and calculated to sit just below the cost of an effective appeal, and referred all three to their bars, the United States Attorney and the Internal Revenue Service.

The verdict: They had read the copyright statute closely enough to find the loophole and not closely enough to notice that a judge can read it too.

Source: U.S. District Court, C.D. California — Ingenuity 13 LLC v. Doe (2013)

He Impersonated His Own Client, In Person, And Was Believed — 2002–2009

Marc Dreier ran a 270-lawyer New York firm and sold roughly $700 million in fake promissory notes purportedly issued by a real estate developer, a Canadian pension plan and a Canadian company, while embezzling more than $46 million in client funds. He impersonated clients in person and by telephone and, according to the government, recruited others to execute elaborate charades. Judge Jed Rakoff sentenced him to twenty years, observing that one must be appalled. Restitution was set at $387,675,303.32 and forfeiture at $746,460,000, artwork included.

The verdict: Ordinary fraudsters forge a signature; Dreier's contribution to the form was deciding that he could simply walk into the room and be the other man.

Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York (2009)

The Barrister Who Informed on Her Own Clients for Fifteen Years — 1995–2020

Nicola Gobbo practised at the Victorian criminal bar while registered as a human source by Victoria Police, passing information about the very clients she was representing. When the Director of Public Prosecutions sought to disclose this to affected convicted persons, the police resisted. The High Court of Australia held in November 2018 that disclosure must prevail, describing "fundamental and appalling breaches" of her obligations as counsel and of her duties to the court, and finding that the agency of police informer had been so abused as to corrupt the criminal justice system. A Royal Commission followed; the Supreme Court of Victoria removed her from the roll in October 2020.

The verdict: Every conviction she helped secure from the wrong side of the bar table had to be reopened at public expense — the most costly demonstration on record that a barrister's duty is not hers to renegotiate privately.

Source: High Court of Australia — AB v CD; EF v CD [2018] HCA 58

The Recorder Who Doctored Her Own Witness Statement — 2013–2016

Constance Briscoe, a barrister and one of the first black women to sit as a recorder in England and Wales, gave statements to police in the investigation that led to the prosecution of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce over transferred speeding points. She made inaccurate statements, altered her own witness statement, and obtained an expert opinion on the wrong version of a document. Convicted in May 2014 on three counts of perverting the course of justice, she was jailed for sixteen months — double the sentences of the principals — and removed from judicial office that August. A disciplinary tribunal disbarred her in April 2016. She did not attend.

The verdict: A sitting recorder set about tampering with the evidence in a prosecution for tampering with the evidence, and did not think the matter worth turning up to explain.

Source: Bar disciplinary tribunal, April 2016 — reported in the Law Society Gazette

The Human-Rights Solicitor Who Paid a Fixer to Find Him Clients — 2016–2024

Phil Shiner, principal of Public Interest Lawyers, built a practice on allegations that British troops had unlawfully killed and mistreated Iraqi civilians. The Al-Sweady Inquiry, costing the taxpayer some £24m, found the principal allegations had no foundation. He was struck off in 2017 on findings including dishonesty. In September 2024 he pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud: obtaining legal aid without disclosing that his agent in Iraq had cold-called clients and taken referral fees, both prohibited. Two counts totalled £199,825.91; his firm had received around £3m in legal aid. Southwark Crown Court gave him two years, suspended.

The verdict: The instructive detail is not the money but the cold-calling — a man so certain of his own righteousness that he saw no difficulty in commissioning the grievances he intended to litigate.

Source: Crown Prosecution Service; Southwark Crown Court, December 2024

Arrogance and Hubris: Eighteen Million in Mortgages on the Same Houses — 2006–2025

Michael Lynn practised as a solicitor in Dublin while developing property through the Celtic Tiger. Between October 2006 and April 2007 he obtained multiple mortgages over the same properties from six financial institutions, none of which knew of the others, including €5.5m against his own home at Howth. He fled the jurisdiction and was extradited from Brazil in 2018. After a first jury disagreed, he was convicted in December 2023 on ten counts of theft totalling some €18.1m. In May 2025 the Court of Appeal refused to reduce his sentence, finding the thefts committed cynically, knowingly and intentionally, and identifying arrogance and hubris.

The verdict: The practising certificate was not incidental to the fraud; it was the instrument of it, which is precisely why the Court of Appeal reached for the word hubris rather than greed.

Source: Court of Appeal of Ireland, May 2025 — reported in The Irish Times

The Silk Who Invented an Oxford Blue, Then Amended the CV to Match — 2013–2026

At a chambers interview in 2013 Anurag Mohindru, then a junior, was asked whether he had played cricket for Oxford. He said he had. When the panel asked for his curriculum vitae, to check whether he had been at the university at all, he amended it to state that he had read medicine at Oxford for a year. He had not. He took silk in 2020, and no complaint reached the Bar Standards Board until August 2021. A disciplinary tribunal found dishonesty proved and ordered disbarment. On appeal the High Court held disbarment disproportionate for an isolated, historic and non-financial lie, substituting the suspension already served.

The verdict: He was asked one flattering question he could simply have answered honestly, and chose instead to manufacture a documentary record — the reflex of a man who assumed nobody would ever ask twice.

Source: High Court (Administrative Court) — Mohindru KC v Bar Standards Board (2026)

He Told the Recorder He Was in Ealing. He Was in Munich. — 2023–2026

At a hearing at Leicester Family Court in August 2023, Priyank Tanwar, a consultant solicitor, told the recorder he was at his firm's Ealing office and blamed his inability to appear on connection difficulties. He was in Munich. Across a forty-five minute hearing he confirmed his London whereabouts on at least four occasions. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal rejected his account that this was a misunderstanding, finding it crystal clear that he had sought to give the misleading impression that he was at the office, and that misleading a judge was misconduct of the highest order. Struck off, with costs of £7,500 reduced from £32,500 on means.

The verdict: Four separate opportunities to say "I am abroad," and he declined all four — evidence less of panic than of a settled belief that a recorder is a man who can be managed.

Source: Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal — reported by Legal Futures

She Instructed a Junior to Lie, and Signed Off With a Smiling Face — 2023–2026

Kirsten Tomlinson, a senior associate admitted in 2010, emailed a newly qualified legal executive in September 2023: "Tell him client says we will withdraw our application to court as soon as we receive the signed docs from him (he doesn't know we haven't issued… we just led him to believe that we did)." She appended a smiling face. The opposing party was unrepresented. The legal executive refused and reported the email to a partner. Tomlinson later described her own message as horrific. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found she had knowingly misled an unrepresented opponent twice and had attempted to involve a junior colleague. Struck off in January 2026.

The verdict: The emoji is the entire case: a solicitor for whom deceiving a man with no lawyer had become light enough work to be punctuated cheerfully.

Source: Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, January 2026 — reported by Legal Futures

Volume 1886 of the Federal Reporter, Twenty-Two Years Before ChatGPT — 2001

Judge Samuel Kent of Galveston received two briefs he described as among the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway, and suggested counsel had entered into a secret pact — complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words — to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats. The plaintiff's sole authority pointed to a nonexistent Volume 1886 of the Federal Reporter, Third Edition. Located at last, the case it apparently meant concerned a defamation at sea. "Take heed and be suitably awed," Kent wrote: the court had managed to state the issue and its resolution in a single paragraph.

The verdict: Long before any machine could invent a citation the profession was managing it unassisted; the software merely industrialised a vice already in stock.

Source: U.S. District Court, S.D. Texas — Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668 (2001)

Six Cases That Never Were, and the Lawyer Who Asked the Machine to Check Its Own Work — 2023

Roberto Mata sued an airline over a knee struck by a metal serving cart. Opposing counsel could not find the authorities in his lawyers' brief, because six of them did not exist. Steven Schwartz, thirty years at the bar, had asked a chatbot for cases and had then asked the same chatbot whether the cases were real. Peter LoDuca signed the filing without reading it. Judge Kevin Castel found both had acted in bad faith and fined them and their firm $5,000. The court also held, with some care, that they had not forged a judge's signature — the fabricated opinions bore no signature to forge.

The verdict: The tell is not that he asked the machine for cases; it is that when doubt arrived, he asked the same machine to reassure him.

Source: U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y. — Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (2023)

The Antique Furniture Key, Offered as a Character Reference for a Machine — 2024

A reply brief in the Second Circuit cited a case that had never existed. Asked to explain, the attorney told the court she had used a chatbot, "to which I am a subscribed and paying member," and offered as evidence of its reliability that it had previously helped her locate an antique furniture key. The panel referred her to its Grievance Panel and ordered her to furnish her client with a copy of the decision. It observed, in the flattest sentence of the affair, that a fake opinion is not existing law.

The verdict: A lawyer who trusts a machine because it once found her a drawer handle has mistaken a parlour trick for a colleague.

Source: U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit — Park v. Kim, 91 F.4th 610 (2024)

Five Fake Authorities, and the Insistence That Invention Is Merely Cosmetic — 2025

In judicial review proceedings against a London borough, counsel and a law centre put five authorities before the Administrative Court. None existed. The other side noticed and asked. The response characterised them as minor citation errors, and described the complaint as cosmetic. A Divisional Court presided over by the President of the King's Bench Division held that it is wholly improper to put fake cases in a pleading, and unreasonable, once that is pointed out, to call them minor citation errors. Wasted costs of £2,000 were ordered; counsel was referred to the Bar Standards Board and the law centre's chief executive to the SRA. A parallel matter involved eighteen fabricated authorities.

The verdict: It is one thing to be caught inventing the law; it is another to insist, on being caught, that invention is a question of presentation.

Source: Divisional Court — Ayinde v Haringey; Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)

Suspended Six Months — Not for the Fabrication, but for Denying It Twice — 2026

In a published order the Ninth Circuit found that an immigration brief cited two decisions that do not exist and never existed, and had put invented quotations into the mouths of two real ones. At argument counsel was asked directly whether artificial intelligence was responsible. He said it was not used. Asked again, he repeated: no, it was not used. Only later did he allow that it was possible. The panel fined each lawyer $2,500, suspended both from practice before the court for six months, and ordered every lawyer at their firms to certify their use of such tools, under penalty of perjury, for two years.

The verdict: The court was explicit that the lie, and not the hallucination, bought the suspension — the only ruling in this entire genre that has correctly identified the offence.

Source: U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit — Lnu v. Blanche, No. 24-4790 (2026)

Read in sequence, three hundred years apart, the entries converge on a single sentence that none of these people would have accepted about themselves: the law is the one profession whose training consists almost entirely of learning how rules fail, and the occupational hazard is concluding that this knowledge is a licence rather than a warning. The Lord Chancellor selling Chancery offices and the immigration lawyer telling a bench twice that he had not used a chatbot are the same man at different desks — each certain that the machinery would not be turned on him, because he had spent his working life operating it. What is striking is not that they were caught. It is how many of them, once caught, elected to explain rather than to concede. The profession's own tribunals, in their flat and unhurried prose, record the result: the fabricated case was a lapse, and the account offered afterward was a decision.

Officers of the Court: Lawyers Behaving Badly