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A Largo lawyer is suspended from practicing law for 30 days for violating Bar rules. A Clearwater lawyer earns a reprimand for missing two hearings and a mediation session.
By EDIE GROSS
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 6, 2001
Professional misconduct has earned two local lawyers a slap from the Florida Supreme Court, the Florida Bar reports.
Largo lawyer Bruce Gregory Kaufmann, 48, was suspended from practicing law for 30 days. His suspension ends March 27, but he will remain on probation for a year. Kaufmann admitted to violating nine Florida Bar rules, eight of them while handling a trust account for a Largo woman.
Clearwater lawyer Christopher G. Miller, 48, will receive a written reprimand for failing to appear for at least two hearings and one mediation session in 1998 and 1999. Miller was supposed to be representing a client in a civil case.
Kaufmann did not return phone calls Monday. According to court documents, Largo resident Hazel A. James came to Kaufmann in July 1998 wanting to know how to set up a trust account. She had received a $110,000 settlement after being injured in an accident in 1997 and wanted the money safeguarded.
Kaufmann deposited the money into a client account and arranged for a guardian for James. But Kaufmann failed to move James' money into a guardianship account, instead keeping it with his own money, a rules violation, according to court records.
Also, James was interested in investing some of her settlement money in real estate. Kaufmann and James' guardian, a woman who worked occasionally as a paralegal for Kaufmann, arranged to have James invest in property owned by another one of Kaufmann's clients. That was a conflict of interest, the Florida Bar said.
James later complained to the 6th Judicial Circuit Probate Court that she never received any accounting of the money being held by Kaufmann. Shortly after that, Kaufmann turned over the money to a court registry. James, 54, died in August 1999.
In a separate case, Kaufmann arranged for a client to sell a piece of equipment that had a lien against it without properly notifying the person who possessed the lien, court documents indicate.
As part of his punishment, Kaufmann, a member of the Bar since 1988, must attend a Florida Bar workshop on how to manage trust accounts. During probation, he also must undergo random trust account audits.
This is not Kaufmann's first run-in with the Florida Bar. In three previous cases, the Bar has issued Kaufmann an "admonishment for minor misconduct," the lowest form of discipline it can mete out.
Miller, who was admitted to the Bar in 1981, had never been disciplined before by the Florida Bar. According to court documents, he was practicing law part-time and had not arranged to receive his legal mail promptly.
As a result, he missed mail notifying him of at least two hearings and one mediation session in 1998 and 1999. He did not attend those hearings, and neither did his uninformed client, records indicate.
Miller also missed a letter from the Florida Bar telling him he was ineligible to practice law in this state because he was behind in his Bar membership fees.
Miller could not be reached for comment. His written reprimand will appear in the Southern Reporter, a magazine that publishes Supreme Court decisions.