Ripping Off Homeowner Seeking Legal Help w/ Home Mortgage Among Charges That Get Texas Attorney Booted From State Bar

In Victoria, Texas, the Victoria Advocate reports:

• A Victoria attorney was disbarred after mishandling a case and ignoring clients who had hired him to help them with a dispute about their home mortgage, the State Bar announced [].
  
  Brian Wade Rogers is prohibited from practicing law. He did not respond to the claims made about him so the Commission for Lawyer Discipline issued a default judgment in favor of the complainant.
  
  Rogers was hired in August 2012 and paid $3,675, but delayed in filing the lawsuit and later agreed to dismiss it without first discussing the dismissal with his clients.
  
  The clients discovered the lawsuit had been dismissed after the 90-day deadline to re-file the case. He also accepted monthly mortgage payments and failed to deliver them to the bank, according to court documents.
  
  In addition to surrendering his law license, Rogers must pay $2,862 in court fees and $3,675 restitution.
  
  Texas Dow Employees Credit Union, which had retained Rogers to represent it on credit obligation matters, sued Rogers in May. The credit union claims he committed theft, fraud and legal malpractice.
  
  Last month, the State Bar placed Rogers on a partially probated suspension after another client complained he had neglected her case.

Source: Victoria attorney disbarred.

See, generally, Frederick Miller, "If You Can't Trust Your Lawyer .... ?", 138 Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Rev. 785 (1990) for more on the apparent, long-standing tolerance for deceit by many in the legal profession:

• This tolerance to deception is encouraged by the profession's institutional civility. Seldom is a fig called a fig, or a shyster a shyster. No, our euphemisms are wonderfully polite: "frivolous conduct," or a "lack of candor;" or "law-office failure;" or, heaven forbid, a "peculation," a "defalcation," or a "negative balance" in a law firms's trust account.
  
  There is also widespread reluctance on the part of lawyers --- again, some lawyers --- to discuss publicly, much less acknowledge, that they have colleagues who engage in deceit and unprofessional conduct.
  
  This reluctance is magnified when the brand of deceit involves the theft of client money and property, notwithstanding that most lawyers would agree that stealing from clients is the ultimate ethical transgression.

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(1) The Client Security Fund of the State Bar of Texas is a fund established to provide some reimbursement to individuals who have lost money or property as a result of the dishonest conduct of an attorney practicing law in the State of Texas.

For similar "attorney ripoff reimbursement funds" that attempt to clean up the financial mess created by the dishonest conduct of lawyers licensed in other states and Canada, see:

• Directory Of Lawyers' Funds For Client Protection (now includes a listing for Canadian client protection funds, courtesy of the American Bar Association);
• Check the USA Client Protection Funds Map;
• Check the Canada Client Protection Funds Map.

Maps available courtesy of The National Client Protection Organization, Inc.

See generally:

• N.Y. fund for cheated clients wants thieving lawyers disbarred, a July, 2015 Associated Press story on this Fund reporting that the Fund's executive director, among other things, is calling for prompt referral to the local district attorney when the disciplinary committee has uncontested evidence of theft by a lawyer injuring a client or an admission of culpability;
  
  When Lawyers Steal the Escrow, a June, 2005 New York Times story describing some cases of client reimbursements ("With real estate business surging and down-payment amounts rising with home prices, the temptation for a lawyer to filch money from a bulging escrow account and later repay it with other clients' money has never been greater, said lawyers who monitor the thefts."),
  
  Thieving Lawyers Draining Client Security Funds, a December, 1991 New York Times story that gives some-real life examples of how client security funds deal with claims and the pressures the administrators of those funds may feel when left insufficiently financed as a result of the misconduct of a handful of lawyer/scoundrels.