Arkansas Sees Sharp Decline in Attorney Sanctions, Raising Oversight Concerns

Robert Brech is the executive director of the Office of Professional Conduct, which is the office that oversees the behavior of attorneys. Brech’s office faces a backlog of cases to review. (Karen E. Segrave)

In 2005, Arkansas publicly disciplined 102 attorneys for unprofessional conduct; last year, it punished just eight.

Formal complaints against lawyers filed annually through the Arkansas Supreme Court Office of Professional Conduct also steadily fell in the same 20-year period, from 159 to 11, according to OPC data.

Asked by Arkansas Business about the sharp decline, the recently installed executive director of the office, Robert Brech, acknowledged the concerning trend and vowed to stop the slide.

Brech, formerly Arkansas budget director at the state Department of Finance & Administration, said in an interview that he’s not sure why far fewer lawyers are facing discipline. But he said he’d investigate.

“Maybe there’s some reason for that,” he said, referring to the decline in disciplinary actions. Brech suggested that 2024 “was a little bit of an anomaly” because the office was understaffed.

Lisa Ballard, the former executive director, left the position in May 2024, and two staff attorneys also left in early 2024. But even 2022 and 2023 saw the lowest number of Arkansas lawyers publicly sanctioned in two decades.

Brech expects more attorneys to face sanctions this year.

In an interview from the OPC’s new office on the fifth floor at 501 Woodlane St., near the Arkansas Capitol, Brech also promised to reduce a yearslong backlog of pending discipline cases and to reach quicker resolutions going forward.

When he arrived at the OPC in April, one open grievance case dated back to 2017. It has since been closed. Nevertheless, at the beginning of May, 1,054 complaints were open, Brech said.

“I intend to resolve things much quicker,” he said. “Something lasting seven or eight years — that’s unacceptable to me.”

Brech’s goal is to address complaints within a month of their arrival, and he hoped to end May with a backlog below 1,000 cases. Around mid-May, that backlog stood at 989.

The OPC’s job is to protect the public from attorneys who fail to fulfill their professional duties. It enforces standards through a system that investigates and prosecutes complaints filed against the 11,304 licensed attorneys in Arkansas.

But the office has drawn criticism from the public and other attorneys about a perceived lack of action against attorneys accused of wrongdoing.

The office doesn’t publicly release complaints against attorneys unless they lead to one of four sanctions: a caution, reprimand, suspension or disbarment. But if an attorney is given a warning, notice of that action isn’t released to the public.

Brech said the Arkansas Supreme Court set those rules.

“I think it’s the proper thing to do,” he said. “If somebody has a complaint against [an attorney] and …  there’s nothing there that we can find, there’s no reason for that to become public.”

The Arkansas State Medical Board, however, operates differently. It told Arkansas Business that under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, “all documents including complaints against licensees of the Board are available to the public as soon as they are received in our office.”

Complaints that never go public are not likely to discourage attorney misconduct because potential clients or clients never learn about them, critics say.

Some Arkansas lawyers say the time has come for a significant overhaul of the Office of Professional Conduct. One of those is Brian Vandiver of Cox Sterling Vandiver & Botteicher of Little Rock.

“You’ve got the foxes guarding the henhouse because you’ve got attorneys that are on the panel that review these decisions, and … let’s be honest, unless you’re robbing your clients, or you’re on drugs or doing something of that nature, you’re not going to get in trouble. And that really needs to change.”

Vandiver represents Dr. Patrick Fraley of Conway, who told Arkansas Business last year that it took about 18 months for the OPC to resolve his complaint against his ex-wife’s divorce attorney. The OPC ultimately determined there was no sufficient basis for the complaint. But it was taking so long to get an answer from the OPC that Fraley had asked the state Supreme Court to force the OPC to act on his complaint, but it denied his request, saying it was moot.

Office of Professional Conduct Numbers

*Warnings are nonpublic. (Source: Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct 2024 Annual Report)

Brech said that he doesn’t agree with Vandiver, but he could see how someone could have that perception.

In fact, he said that after he was named to take over the office, one lawyer told him that attorneys stopped filing grievances because so few lawyers were disciplined. “That’s fair enough,” Brech said.

And another attorney told Brech that there wasn’t a fear of violating rules. “And so those two impacted my thinking on this a lot,” he said.

Stark Ligon, who was the head of the OPC from 2001 until April 2021, wouldn’t comment on the decline of the punishment. “I would not try and interpret numbers without having additional background information that might impact on that,” he said. “That would be me speculating, and I’d like to not do that, and especially in somebody else’s professional arena.”

He also said that he would be severely restricted and limited on what he could say because basically all the information at the office is confidential.

Ligon left the office in 2021 to join the newly created Office of Ethics Counsel, which the Arkansas Supreme Court had formed to provide attorneys advice about legal ethics issues and interpretations of the Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct. The state Supreme Court closed the office about two years later, citing budget issues.

Ballard of North Little Rock replaced Ligon as the OPC director.

She had been on a Committee on Professional Conduct panel that reviewed complaints. She did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.

Justice Courtney Hudson stopped serving as the liaison for the OPC last year. But she told Arkansas Business via email that  because the OPC lacked a permanent executive director for most of 2024 and into 2025, as well as other staffers, “I am not surprised to see an extreme decrease in sanctions, if in fact those data points are accurate.”

“Nonetheless, OPC, former Ethics Counsel, and the Court have been diligent in providing ethics-related ‘continuing legal education’ seminars to members of the bench and bar for well over a decade,” she wrote. “I would imagine that this educational programming has played a significant role in decreasing the number of sanctions.”

Supreme Court Concerns

In 2023, the OPC’s handling of an attorney’s suspension raised concerns at the Arkansas Supreme Court.

The court lifted the interim suspension of William Asa Hutchinson III’s law license in May 2023, a suspension handed down by a Committee on Professional Conduct panel. The Bentonville attorney and son of former Gov. Asa Hutchinson was arrested in January 2023 on charges that included driving while intoxicated, second offense, and possession of a controlled substance. His interim suspension came a week after his arrest.

Hutchinson appealed, arguing that he wasn’t given notice or a hearing. The Supreme Court eventually reviewed the case, and found that law license suspensions “should occur primarily only after notice and a hearing,” according to its opinion of May 18, 2023.

The state’s high court also said it had “grave concerns about uniformity of treatment” in connection with Hutchinson’s case and compared it with that of Little Rock attorney Everett Martindale. Martindale was indicted in federal court in December 2019 and pleaded guilty in 2022, to conspiracy to commit mail fraud in the amount of more than $3.5 million, the opinion said.

“Yet, his law license wasn’t suspended until December 1, 2022, months after his guilty plea,” the order said.

The opinion said that while the committee has the power to summarily suspend law licenses, “it should exercise that power cautiously. Suspension should occur primarily only after notice and a hearing. This procedure will allow more uniformity in application.”

(The Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct oversees the OPC.)

Justice Hudson wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justices Karen Baker and Robin Wynne. The committee’s actions “were entirely authorized by the rules,” Hudson wrote. But she said that going forward, the rules should be amended to provide notice before placing an interim suspension.

Brech said he wouldn’t comment on specific cases. But he said that grievances should be resolved in a more timely manner. Brech also said that once the backlog is resolved, he would welcome some type of deadline that involves the timely resolution of a complaint.

In the last five years, fewer than 20 attorneys a year have been publicly punished: eight in 2024, down from 16 in 2023.

Brech said that if 2024 had been a normal year at the OPC, about twice as many attorneys would have been publicly sanctioned.

But 2024 wasn’t a normal year.

In early 2024, the OPC saw two of its staff attorneys leave.

By May 2024, there was a plan to move OPC’s office at 2100 Riverfront Drive, Suite 200, in Little Rock to the Winthrop Rockefeller Building.

Ballard didn’t want the office to relocate and emailed a memo to Justice Hudson, who was the court’s OPC liaison at the time, on May 15, 2024.

“With the setup, there are a number of issues, but the most significant deficiency is there is NO HEARING ROOM,” Ballard’s memo said.

Ballard’s emails were turned over to Arkansas Business after they were requested under the Freedom of Information Act last year. Hudson filed a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court in September to block the release of the emails, but the state Supreme Court eventually ordered them released.

Ballard also said that she was concerned about confidentiality in the new office. “When persons come in for meetings whether it be in association with an investigation or any other business related purpose, there would be nowhere outside of a common area or designated office space to take said meeting.”

The day after Ballard sent the email was her last day at the OPC. The emails provided to Arkansas Business didn’t shed any light on why Ballard departed. Hudson said it was inappropriate for her to discuss personnel issues.

The OPC later moved into the new office.

But in his first month on the job, Brech said that he didn’t have issues about the new OPC space. “I find this to be adequate, and it’s ideal as far as close to the court, close to the Capitol,” Brech said. “There are hearing or meeting rooms in this building, and there are meeting rooms over at the Justice Building that we can use for hearings and other things.”

Brech said he had recently hired an attorney, bringing the total number of attorneys to three on the staff, and a law clerk.

“I can tell you we’re going to pursue every complaint,” he said. “For those that are doing wrong, I probably would be concerned.”