“Defence lawyer who slept with prosecutor stopped from testifying in conflict-of-interest motion” —

• “One of the two lawyers at the centre of a motion that could put an end to a cannabis trafficking case at the Montreal courthouse appeared before a Superior Court judge on Wednesday and was ready to testify, but he ultimately did not take the stand.
• “Defence lawyer Mathieu Rondeau-Poissant was in the courtroom before Superior Court Justice Gregory Moore, who is hearing evidence on a motion seeking to have a stay of proceedings placed on the charges filed against Bruno Desmarais, one of 10 men arrested in a Sûreté du Québec investigation dubbed Postcure.”
• “Weeks ago, Alice Bourbonnais-Rougeau, the lead prosecutor in Postcure, admitted to her superior in the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales (DPCP) that she had intimate relations with Rondeau-Poissant late last year. She initially denied she and Rondeau-Poissant were anything more than friends, but ultimately confessed to her boss in June. She was told to work from home and to not handle any current cases.”
• “As part of his motion, Desmarais says Bourbonnais-Rougeau was potentially privy to defence strategy through the relationship and was therefore in a conflict of interest. If Moore rules that a stay of proceedings should be placed on the charges in Desmarais’s case, the same could apply for the other accused.”
• “Giuseppe Battista, a lawyer who is representing Bourbonnais-Rougeau, who has not appeared in court for the motion, said she is currently on sick leave until Nov. 30. When Moore asked the lawyers involved in the hearing if Rondeau-Poissant could testify on Wednesday, things became complicated.”
• “A prosecutor said the Crown could not call Rondeau-Poissant as a witness until the defence declares its evidence closed. Meanwhile, defence lawyers said Rondeau-Poissant should not testify until he has gone through evidence of messages he exchanged with the prosecutor. ‘I would like to see them before I take a stance on what can be disclosed,’ Rondeau-Poissant told the judge. Battista said reviewing the messages could take time and that it would be impossible to complete the process before the next scheduled court date on Friday.”
• “On Tuesday, Moore sentenced one of the men arrested in Postcure, Gerard Gauvreau, 59, of Oka, to a 12-month prison term to be followed by 12 months of unsupervised probation. In April, Gauvreau pleaded guilty to one count related to drug trafficking and a section of the Cannabis Act.”

“MSU hired lawyers with conflicting loyalties, Brenda Tracy says” —

• “A potential wrinkle has emerged in how Michigan State University is fending off a federal lawsuit filed by Brenda Tracy. The university has retained the multinational law firm Jones Day to defend against Tracy’s lawsuit, which alleges, among other things, that a trustee leaked her name to the media during a confidential investigation into former football coach Mel Tucker’s sexual harassment of her.”
• “Now, Tracy is claiming that Jones Day’s involvement in the suit represents a conflict of interest.”
• “The firm was previously hired by MSU to independently investigate whether someone associated with the university, including the trustees, leaked the existence of the investigation into Tucker or Tracy’s name. That probe, which ended in December 2023, was ultimately unable to conclude whether someone at MSU was behind the leak, and found no evidence that any trustee knew Tracy’s identity as the complainant before her name became public.”
• “That previous working relationship, Tracy said in an amended complaint filed Saturday in federal court, means that Jones Day has conflicting interests that would require the firm to discredit its own findings or undermine Tracy by ‘leveraging confidential information’ obtained during its previous investigation.”
• “Ethical standards in the legal profession require attorneys to avoid representing a client when the attorney’s responsibilities to another client, a former client or a third party can jeopardize the attorney’s ability to represent their client. Large firms like Jones Day, which has over 2,500 lawyers across 40 offices, are required to avoid conflicting loyalties within their firm. “
• “‘If one lawyer in a firm has a conflict, all the lawyers in the firm have a conflict, for the most part,’ said University of Illinois Chicago Law Professor Megan Bess. MSU’s decision to retain the same firm behind the initial investigation ‘eyebrow-raising,’ Bess said, though it’s unlikely that Jones Day has a material conflict of interest in the case. It’s possible that MSU simply picked the firm because its lawyers would be more familiar with the information relevant to the case, she said.”
• “One potential concern Bess raised was that the Jones Day attorneys could hypothetically use information they uncovered during the original investigation but never reported to aid their present-day defense.”
• “Terri Chase, the Jones Day attorney representing the university, did not respond to requests for comment before publication. Karen Truskowski, Tracy’s attorney, declined to comment.”
• “The filing also alleges that the university’s handling of Tracy’s complaint against Tucker was ‘heavily influenced’ by another conflict of interest: An apparent desire to satisfy MSU alum and superdonor Mat Ishbia.”
• “According to the filing, the Title IX Coordinator overseeing the investigation into Tracy’s complaint failed to inform Tracy that David Zacks, the now-deceased general counsel for a company owned by Ishbia, was representing Tucker in the investigation. That concealment, Tracy said, ‘created, at minimum, the appearance of donor-driven influence and institutional bias.'”
• “The amended complaint continues to accuse Trustees Rema Vassar and Dennis Denno, who are named as defendants in their official and individual capacities, of conspiring to retaliate against Tracy and interfere with her nonprofit and speaking venture. It asserts that the trustees’ actions furthering this conspiracy included ‘filing disparaging pleadings, leaking to media, and disclosing private facts.'”
  “Trustees Vassar and Denno did not respond to request for comment before publication.”

“Former judge pays civil penalty for conflict of interest violation” —

• “Former Probate & Family Court Judge Lawrence Army Jr. has paid a $4,000 civil penalty for violating the conflict of interest law by appointing his father as a special master to sell a home in a divorce proceeding.”
• “The Ethics Commission on Sept. 23 announced a disposition agreement in which Army admits to the violations and waives his right to a public hearing.”
• “In December 2022, while filling in for a judge at Essex Probate & Family Court, Army presided over a divorce proceeding in which the previous judge had ordered the sale of the marital home, according to the Ethics Commission. Following a hearing in which the parties reported they had not agreed to the terms of the sale, Army appointed his father, Lawrence Army Sr., as a special master for the sale of the home and set his fee at $450 per hour.”
• “Army’s appointment of his father was contrary to a Supreme Judicial Court rule requiring such fee-generating appointments to be made in order from a court-maintained list of persons eligible for appointment. Not only was Army’s father not the next available person on the Essex court’s list; his name did not appear on the list at all, the Ethics Commission said. Army’s father’s office was also approximately 65 miles from the property to be sold.”
• “First Justice Frances Giordano vacated Army’s appointment in January 2023 and appointed a different special master to sell the home. As a result, Army’s father did not receive any fee from the appointment.”
• “The conflict of interest law prohibits state employees from participating in matters in which members of their immediate family have a financial interest. It also prohibits public employees from using or attempting to use their official positions to obtain valuable, unwarranted benefits for anyone. In the disposition agreement, Army admits to violating both of these prohibitions.”
• “The full text of the disposition agreement can be found here. “

“Ex-GOP attorney general candidate temporarily loses law license over inappropriate relationship” —

• “The Illinois Supreme Court has ordered former Republican Illinois attorney general candidate Tom DeVore’s law license suspended for 60 days, following a yearslong public feud involving his client-turned-girlfriend and the state’s attorney discipline board.”
• “The court’s order affirms a recommendation this spring by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which found ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that DeVore’s actions related to Riley Craig had broken several Supreme Court ethics rules.”
• “Craig, a Springfield salon owner, was one of the hundreds of clients DeVore represented in dozens of lawsuits challenging Gov. JB Pritzker’s COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. In 2022, DeVore unsuccessfully ran to unseat Attorney General Kwame Raoul.”
• “DeVore, a lawyer from downstate Greenville, began a romantic relationship with Craig after filing suit on her behalf in May 2020, according to ARDC documents. Though Craig’s litigation against the Pritzker administration was unsuccessful, their relationship continued for nearly three years.”
• “In his defense against the ARDC case, DeVore claimed that his work as Riley’s attorney ended by the time their romantic involvement began in late May or June 2020. The ARDC disputed DeVore’s timeline, pointing to continued attorney behavior in that case.”
• “DeVore also went on to represent Riley in three other legal matters — including her divorce — that summer. That ‘demonstrated an unbroken continuation of his attorney-client relationship,’ the ARDC ruled.”
• “The disciplinary panel began looking into DeVore’s behavior in 2021, and during that initial investigation, Craig said she was not a client when their sexual relationship began. She repeated that claim on social media while DeVore was running for attorney general in 2022.”
• “But in May 2023, a few months after Craig and DeVore broke up, she ‘threatened to change her story’ to the disciplinary panel so that DeVore would ‘lose his law license,’ according to the ARDC report.”
• “The disciplinary panel pointed out that ‘even consensual sexual activity between an attorney and a client constitutes an impermissible conflict of interest because the attorney’s emotional involvement with the client creates a significant risk that the attorney’s independent professional judgment will be impaired.'”
• “DeVore also got involved in Craig’s business venture to launch a hair product business, for which the pair took out $600,000 in loans in 2021. But in doing so, the ARDC found DeVore failed to provide ‘required safeguards’ for Craig.”
• “DeVore declined to comment on the court’s order to Capitol News Illinois. His law license will be suspended for 60 days beginning Oct. 10.”