Lawyer discipline will receive new review

Three weeks after a survey ranked Massachusetts as slowest in the country to resolve allegations of lawyer misconduct, the state's highest court announced yesterday that it was bringing in an outside team to scrutinize the disciplinary system.

The Supreme Judicial Court said a team of consultants from the American Bar Association will visit during the last week in June to interview lawyers, members of the high court, and other officials involved in the disciplinary process. Within four months, the team is expected to recommend improvements.

Joan Kenney, a spokeswoman for the judiciary, said the Chicago-based association asked Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall in September whether the SJC would welcome an evaluation of the state's disciplinary system, which receives roughly 6,000 complaints or inquiries about lawyers each year. Kenney said no specific problem prompted the court to agree to the review, which she said is part of a broader assessment of the judiciary that began two years ago.

But the announcement follows a harsh Massachusetts Bar Association critique of the disciplinary system last month that concluded that ''inordinate delay" is eroding public confidence, crippling investigations, and clouding the reputation of lawyers who have done nothing wrong.

Under the state's disciplinary system, created and overseen by the SJC, the state Office of Bar Counsel investigates and prosecutes complaints of misconduct, and the Board of Bar Overseers metes out punishment.

In about half of the 38 cases decided by the board in the past two fiscal years, it took four years or longer from the time a complaint was filed for a lawyer to be formally charged, according to the Massachusetts Bar Association study. Some investigations took seven or eight years, the report found, and one took nearly 10 years.

The SJC's announcement did not specify what the American Bar Association team will scrutinize. But the group says it has evaluated more than 40 disciplinary systems since 1980.

Meanwhile, the legal community is awaiting one of the state's most closely-watched lawyer discipline cases ever: A hearing officer for the Board of Bar Overseers is expected to issue a report any day concerning allegations that three lawyers involved in the bitter family feud for control over the DeMoulas supermarket chain committed wrongdoing in 1997.

Richard K. Donahue, Gary Crossen, and Kevin Curry are accused of concocting an elaborate ruse to obtain information from a law clerk to Maria I. Lopez, who was then a Superior Court judge. They allegedly violated the code of ethics by tricking the clerk, Paul Walsh, with a phony job offer and then threatening his career if he didn't cooperate in their investigation of whether Lopez was biased against their clients.

Yesterday, both the lawyer who chaired the Massachusetts Bar Association committee that issued last month's study and the bar counsel said they welcomed the outside consultants, who will receive $5,000 from the state to defray costs.

''The ABA will bring an objective sense to the debate that, perhaps, will be met with less defensiveness than the task force's report was met with," said Roy A. Bourgeois, a Worcester lawyer who headed the committee.

That was an apparent reference to the reaction of the bar counsel, Daniel C. Crane, to the committee's study. In an opinion piece published in the May 9 issue of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Crane said that when he became bar counsel in 1999, he identified the delays as the biggest problem in disciplinary cases.

Yesterday, Crane said he, too, was eager to have outside consultants review the disciplinary system. But he said he hopes they will have a better appreciation for how systems vary from state to state. He said, for example, that the Massachusetts Bar Association study was misleading because it failed to emphasize that, unlike Massachusetts, some states do not track complaints against lawyers until after the resolution of civil or criminal complaints against the accused.

In fiscal 2004, which ended Aug. 31, the Board of Bar Overseers identified 77 lawyers whom it disciplined, including 20 who received reprimands, 26 who had their licenses suspended for specific periods, four who had their licenses suspended indefinitely, two who resigned because of sanctions, and 25 who were disbarred.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.