Minnesota Lawyer Blog

The Wall Street Journal law blog tackles a topic today that has gotten a lot of play locally -- the attorney-discipline case of Hennepin County prosecutor Gemma Graham. ("Prosecutor Suspended for Spurning CLE Requirements.")

The facts of Graham's case will be familiar to our readers at this point, but the comments the post generates make good reading. For example, there is a lot of negative commentary on the value of mandatory CLEs. Here's one of the more cutting:

This is genius, skip CLE for 20 years and get a 900 fine! I’d do that in a
second. CLE is the biggest scam in the world. It provides no value except to the
CLE companies who bilk their customers and line the pockets of the state bars
for mailing lists and stringent requirements.

Although the comment is a bit harsh, I personally prefer a voluntary CLE system to a mandatory one -- even with the breaks for bagels and chocolate chip cookies.

The posting also contained the revelation that Minnesota is the home state of the principal writer of the WSJ Law blog, Dan Slater. While the Manhattan litigator turned blogger left the Minnie Apple for the Big Apple some time ago, his nod to the Gopher State shows he hasn't forgotten the taste of lutefisk.

As the Strib reports today, there has been a lot of talk in the legal community about whether or not Hennepin County prosecutor Gemma Graham got off too lightly for prosecuting cases while her law license was on restricted status. For a period of 20 years -- from 1986 to 2007 -- Graham continued to practice despite being in noncompliance with the state's continuing legal education requirement. (The high court gave her a reprimand and two years of probation.)

On the one hand, there is no necessary correlation between the CLE requirement and whether a lawyer stays current in his or her field. If you are a criminal law practitioner, you could satisfy the CLE requirement by taking courses in family law, real estate law or any other kind of law you want. In fact, you could take no CLEs in any substantive area of practice at all and still satisfy the CLE requirement with professional-development courses. (You must also accrue a limited number of ethics and elimination-of-bias credits each reporting period as well.) In any event, Graham says she attended some CLEs during the period at issue, but didn't properly record them to make sure she was in compliance.

On the other hand, if Minnesota is going to have a CLE requirement, there have to be consequences for not following it that would dissuade those who would play fast and loose with the rules -- and possibly the law. (It is a misdemeanor in Minnesota to practice law without a valid license.) What bothers me most about Graham's case is the length of time involved -- two decades. She would have known during that entire period that she was not meeting the state's license requirement, but chose to ignore it. The fact that she would make that choice time and time again -- despite reporting period after reporting period where she could have followed the rules -- is what I find most disconcerting about the entire episode. I don't blame Hennepin County Public Defender Lenny Castro for being upset about this -- a prosecutor who would make such a questionable series of choices raises some concerns in my mind as well.

On balance, the punishment strikes me as light given the length of time involved. However, the embarrassment Graham now faces with the media coverage of this has added a new element to that original sanction. I suspect any lawyer thinking of practicing without fulfilling his or her CLE requirement would think twice about doing so now.

With the lawyers in the Attorney General's Office engaged in an attempt to unionize, Minnesota Lawyer's Dan Heilman decided to take a look at the interplay of unions and public sector lawyers. According to the article in this week's Minnesota Lawyer, prosecutors in nine counties belong to unions. The latest to unionize was St. Louis County, which unionized late last year, shortly after a 28-year incumbent County Attorney was unseated by a newcomer.

“It was a hotly contested election in St. Louis County, and I think it woke some people up,” said Eric Lehto, organizing director for AFSCME’s St. Paul-based Council 5. “People knew there would be changes at the top level. There was a high level of seniority that seemed to be shifting. The county attorneys felt the only way they could count on job security was to work toward a collective bargaining agreement. They all completed sign-up cards, indicating their desire to form a union.”

The assistant St. Louis County attorneys are still negotiating the terms of their collective bargaining agreement with the county, said Melanie Ford, who took over as St. Louis County attorney in January. However, their agreement would likely be similar to that between Hennepin and Ramsey counties and AFSCME, which represents about 1.4 million workers nationwide.

A union representative has a nice sum up in the article. “Organizing does seem to be on the rise,” Council 65 Executive Director Steve Preble said. “Lawyers aren’t typically union people, but why not? They’re concerned with a lot of the same issues.”

For more, see "Unionization ‘on the rise’ among lawyers in the public sector." (Password required.)