Do the Sins of the Client Fall on the Lawyer?

Remember Aaron Wider, the R-rated corporate executive?

The president of HTFC Corp., a mortgage company, used the f-word "73 times when the opposing side in a lawsuit took his deposition. At one point, Wider said that HTFC stood for "Hit That Fuckin' Clown."

Wider and his lawyer, Joseph R. Ziccardi, were each sanctioned $29,322 by Judge Eduardo Robreno of the Federal District Court in Philadelphia.

Now, Ziccardi is asking Robreno to reconsider - and he is getting support from other lawyers.

That's because Wider is not the first, and, alas, probably will not be the last, Client from Hell.

Lawyers from Jenner & Block, a big law firm in Chicago, were alarmed by the judge's decision because they had never, in their practice, recalled sanctions coming down on a lawyer for the behavior of a client.

"My partners and I all had the same reaction --- which is 'wow!" --- this is new territory," says Jenner & Block's Robert Byman, who researched the issue.

The decision had others scratching their heads as well.

"I can't think of any case in which a judge has sanctioned a lawyer for failing to be an adequate babysitter," said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. "But I can understand why a judge might expect the lawyer to try."

Byman found that during the trial of the Chicago Seven, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden appeared in judicial robes, took them off in front of the jury and stomped on them. After the trial, the judge imposed a criminal contempt sentence on their lawyer, William Kunstler, for his own behavior in the case. But the judge never sanctioned Kunstler for the conduct of his clients.

The Jenner & Block research turned up a lot of profane language by judges and lawyers themselves. One particularly vulgar exchange between a judge and a lawyer in a Connecticut case cannot even be paraphrased here.

These are instances of lawyer behaving badly, but Byman could not uncover any written opinions castigating lawyers for badly behaving clients.

Under the prevailing wisdom, he said, "no matter how outrageous the client is, the client gets the sanctions," Byman said. " Obviously, the lawyer can't be complicit."

But in his ruling, Judge Robreno said Ziccardi's "complicity is inexcusable," citing chuckling and snickering by the lawyer during his client's obscene ranting.

Ziccardi, however, contends that he was not chuckling or snickering, as opposing lawyers suggested, and has a supporting affidavit from HTFC's corporate counsel, Raymond Voulo, who also attended the deposition. Both lawyers "repeatedly warned Mr. Wider in no uncertain terms" that his conduct was going to prompt sanctions from the judge.

In asking the judge to reconsider, Ziccardi argues that he was not given fair notice of the sanctions against him.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he is also seeking to withdraw from representing Wider.

Karen Donovan