The D.C. Court of Appeals suspended a lawyer as the District’s legal ethics board investigates charges that she tried to inflate her winnings from a lawsuit.
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals ordered Terri Lea to be suspended Thursday for at least 30 days and ordered her to cooperate with an ongoing ethics investigation, alleging that she tried to increase a lawsuit award from $13,500 to $50,000.
The discipline stems from a 1999 lawsuit in which Lea was a plaintiff against a real estate company. After winning the case, she and her lawyer claimed that she was entitled to $50,000 and that her demand for $13,500 was “a typo.”
The judge in her lawsuit was angry and ordered Lea and her lawyer to pay the real estate firm’s legal fees, nearly $7,500, court records state.
Lea also was referred to the D.C. Bar Counsel, the city’s top legal enforcer. The Bar Counsel notified Lea that she was under investigation, but received no response. In the late summer of 2001, Lea contacted the Bar Counsel and asked for a chance to refute the allegations against her.
A new letter went out to the home of Lea’s mother, in Pennsylvania. Again, there was no response. Follow-up letters came back marked “refused” and “mail on hold,” Thursday’s appellate decision states.
Lea’s disappearance put ethics investigators in a bind because D.C. rules require lawyers to be served properly before they can be brought up on ethics charges. The case dragged on for years, with the Bar Counsel finally publishing announcements in local newspapers.
When she finally appeared to answer the ethics charges against her, she said she had been victimized by a run of horrid luck. Her boyfriend, the father of her daughter, had been robbed and killed. In Pennsylvania, she had come down with a rare blood disorder and was hospitalized.
She told the ethics hearing in 2005 that “over the past four years of my life, I have been very much displaced and suffering financial detriment. …”
Lea, however, offered no evidence to back up her claims, court papers state.
Efforts to reach Lea for this story were unsuccessful.
