Arizona's attorney disciplinary system appears to be more transparent than the sytem used in many states. It is, for example, possible to obtain online judicial opinions that detail what specific lawyers have done to warrant being disciplined.  But, as is explained below, if you are considering hiring an attorney in Arizona, it isn't easy to determine online whether your lawyer has ever been disciplined.

The Attorney Discipline Unit of the Arizona Supreme Court handles formal disciplinary charges against lawyers.  The Court's website identifies lawyers who are currentlly facing disciplinary charges. For each of these attorneys, it possible to review the report submitted by the Hearing Officer who heard the evidence in the case against the lawyer as well as the decision of the Disciplinary Commission, which in effect acts as an appealate body and reviews the Hearing Officer's decision. Both the Hearing Officer's report and the Disiciplinary Commission's review are accessible online in pdf format. In addition, the Attorney Disiciplie Unit publishes a Matrix that identies all disiciplinary decisions made by the Arizona Supreme Court since 1986. The Matrix also identifies disbarments and suspensions, the most serious violations, between 1981 and 1985. Beginning in 2003, the Matrix includes a link to the actual decisions made by the Hearing Officer, the Disciplinary Commission, and ultimately by the Arizona Supreme Court. For cases decided between 1981 and 2002, only the summaries of these decisions are available online. It appears that if you want to receive the actual disiciplinary reports for cases decided before 2003, you need to call the Supreme Court and pay for copies of the disciplinary record to be mailed to you.

The authorities in Arizona ahould be commended for including the full-text versions of the disciplinary decisions. Too often, summaries of disiciplinary proceedings are written in such a dry style—and contain so little information—that it is difficult to get a full picture of what the lawyer did and why they received the punsihment they did.  The disciplinary decisions often reveal what arguments were made in defense of the accused attorney as well as the judge's conclusion as to whether the accused lawyer acted defiantly or was contrite. These can be important details to know if you are considering hiring a lawyer who has previoulsy been disciplined.

Arizona's online reporting system does, however, suffer from a serious flaw; its search feature doesn't work very well. In theory, it should be possible to conduct an online search to determine whether a particular lawyer has previously been disciplined.  But when I entered the names of specific lawyers into the search engine, the results were essentailly useless. The results linked to the Matrix for certain years but the names of the specific lawyers I searched for were nowhere to be found.  

Thus, Arizona's online system is helpful when you want to find out information about a lawyer who you know has already been disciplined. It is particularly user friendly when you know the specific year in which the lawyer was disiciplined. But if you don't know this information and you want to find out whether a particular lawyer has been disciplined, the Supreme Court's website isn't very helpful.

In a future post, I'll report on what to expect when you call the Arizona Supreme Court to determine whether a particular lawyer has been disciiplined. But even if it is possible to find out this information by phone, the fact that this information isn't online means that far fewer clients will be able to make an informed decision about one of the more important decisons they make in their lives—which attorney to hire.

Posted by Gideon on 05/29 at 12:58 PM
Categories: Arizona Lawyers | Categories: Attorney Discipline | Categories: Background Checks on Lawyers | Categories: Hiring A Lawyer | Permalink