Confronted with an ethics investigation zeroing in on shady actions from securing hundreds of thousands in loans from a brain-injured client — secured by property the lawyer did not own — to failing to disclose referral fees, New Hampshire attorney Justin Nadeau apparently thought he could get out of his troubles by destroying his computer.
He could not. He was disbarred by the state supreme court.
Per the NH Journal, quoted by the Legal Profession Blog:
According to the Supreme Court’s disbarment order released Tuesday, Nadeau slow-walked producing documents related to the case to the PCC. The Democrat even destroyed his computer before the hearing. Nadeau claims he made all the appropriate conflict of interest disclosures and eventually produced printed copies of the letter he claimed he sent her.
However, James Berriman, the computer expert hired by the PCC, looked through Nadeau’s office server and found the dates on the documents Nadeau gave to the committee were fake, and the documents were created well after he took the money from Fahey.
Putting aside the obvious ethical problems with destroying evidence, how does an attorney not realize that this is all easily discoverable at this point. Computer forensics specialists have been catching people trying to destroy evidence for years now.
It’s the hubris of a JD to think that you’re more clever than someone who’s actually trained in the specific technical skill at issue. We usually see this come up when judges tell us how much better at medical science they are than the FDA or know more about pandemics because they fancy themselves economists, but it manifests just as frequently in thinking that they’re better at computer science than everyone else.
Oops.
“One Of The Most Significant Violations” [Legal Profession Blog]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
