ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
THE JUDGE CALLED their lawsuit the legal equivalent of a "drive-by shooting." The lawyers fired back by calling the judge "unprofessional" and questioning the court's integrity. Stay tuned.
One week after being sanctioned for bringing a lawsuit that a federal judge called frivolous, a Roanoke lawyer and his co-counsel have filed a strongly worded response that questions the judge's impartiality.
The highly unusual motion states that an "angry and red-faced" U.S. District Judge Samuel Wilson "openly and unprofessionally attacked" the lawyers, Joseph Anthony of Roanoke and Michael Richardson of Tennessee.
Last week, Wilson sanctioned Anthony and Richardson for filing a legal malpractice lawsuit that he called "so devoid of merit" that it was the legal equivalent of a "drive-by shooting." Wilson dismissed the lawsuit, which had accused Gentry, Locke, Rakes & Moore of Roanoke and two other law firms of conspiring with the Virginia Supreme Court to rig a decision against Blacksburg developer Georgia Anne Snyder-Falkinham.
The judge said he planned to require Snyder-Falkinham and her attorneys, Anthony and Richardson, to pay some or all of at least $53,000 in legal fees as punishment for filing the lawsuit.
In their response, Anthony and Richardson suggested that Wilson was protecting the lawyers they sued by trying to stymie the plaintiff's attempts to expose corruption and collusion between the state's highest court and Roanoke's second-largest law firm.
"It was obvious that this court took the allegations ... regarding the wrongful acts of attorneys/justices as a challenge to its and all other judges' integrity," the motion states.
"Apparently, the court's position is that the integrity, etc., of lawyers and judges are so far above the man/woman on the street that lawyers/judges deserve their own set of laws."
The motion asks Wilson to delay ongoing proceedings over the amount of sanctions to be paid and allow an overriding issue - whether they should have been imposed in the first place - to be appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Anthony and Richardson assert that they were "ambushed" at a May 6 hearing in U.S. District Court in Roanoke. They showed up prepared to argue against a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, they said, only to be surprised by Wilson's demands that they explain why sanctions should not be filed against them.
"Instantly, the court openly displayed an aggressive, hostile attitude toward counsel for the plaintiff, convincingly acknowledging to a courtroom of more than 30 persons that the court had disdain for plaintiff's counsel," the motion states.
Alluding at one point to Wilson's "personal, first-name relationships" with the families of some of the lawyers named in the legal malpractice claim, the motion raises questions about the judge's integrity.
"Any court that impatiently, imprudently, and unprofessionally dispenses justice, committing error, almost always brings into question its integrity," the motion states.
Wilson is out of his office this week, and no hearing has been scheduled on the issues raised by Anthony and Richardson's motion.
Snyder-Falkinham's lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal claims she has made since 1991 in an effort to get back millions of dollars she lost in real estate ventures in the 1980s.
She originally sued Bruce Stockburger, a general partner with Gentry, Locke who represented her in some business dealings, over a conflict of interest. The case was referred to mediation and settled, with the law firm paying Snyder-Falkinham an undisclosed amount of money.
But the developer claimed she never agreed to the settlement and didn't cash the check. She hired new attorneys and went back to court, but a state judge ruled that the case had in fact been settled. She then appealed that decision to the Virginia Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court upheld the judge's decision this year. Snyder-Falkinham then turned to federal court, filing a lawsuit claiming that Gentry, Locke lawyers conspired with Supreme Court justices to "corruptly" decide against her.
The gist of her federal lawsuit was that Gentry, Locke and its partners, who are well-connected in the state's legal circles, used their influence to avoid the embarrassment of successful legal malpractice claims against the firm.
Much of the suit is based on an anonymous letter supposedly written by the "grateful wife" of a Gentry, Locke lawyer, thanking the Supreme Court justices for their "intense and concerted effort" to protect the firm's reputation.
In his opinion dismissing the lawsuit and imposing sanctions, Wilson suggested that the letter may have come from Snyder-Falkinham's camp. And even if it were genuine, he wrote, her attorneys still had an obligation to investigate its origin before making it the sole basis of a lawsuit.
Jonathan Schraub, a lawyer for a Richmond law firm also named in Snyder-Falkinham's lawsuit, asked this week that Wilson impose sanctions "substantially stiffer" than he might be considering.
A large fine might be required, Schraub wrote, "to ultimately bring a halt to the abusive filings that might otherwise spew endlessly from the plaintiff and her utterly irresponsible legal counsel."
LENGTH: Medium: 94 linesby CNB