The Tennessee Supreme Court this month disbarred a Nashville lawyer, Brian Philip Manookian, for habitual unethical conduct that I have a hard time believing that any lawyer would dare to engage in even once. Manookian, wrote the Court, “engaged in this long pattern of intimidating and degrading conduct” to succeed in a medical liability case, the Tennessee Supreme Court said. His goal was to coerce opposing lawyers “into standing down to avoid personal humiliation and emotional distress for them or their families. A business model of sorts, based on fear….To say that Mr. Manookian engaged in multiple offenses is to understate,” the state supreme court continued. “Despite lectures, fines, sanctions and suspensions from judge after judge, Mr. Manookian did not choose merely to continue engaging in misconduct—each time he received the expected negative reaction to his behavior, he responded by escalating it.”
This guy, who has been licensed in Tennessee since 2007, practiced law like a mob boss. In a medical liability case in which Manookian represented a plaintiff suing HCA Health Services of Tennessee, he faced an opposing counsel whom Manookia knew and once worked for. In fact, the lawyer had fired Manookian. When his adversary asked for supplemental discovery responses, Manookian sent him an email saying that he had heard that the lawyer’s daughter had new job. “What a fantastic opportunity; particularly given her history of academic failure and alcohol and substance abuse,” Manookian wrote. “I happen to have some very close friends at [name of daughter’s employer]. I will make it a point to see what I can do regarding her prospects there.”
This was not an isolated example of the lawyer sending “Nice family you have there—too bad if anything were to happen to it!” threats. Another lawyer opposing Manookian was so alarmed by his threats that the lawyer upgraded his home security system, put family members on alert, gave Manookian’s photo to the security guard for his building, and intensified his handgun training. After determining the make, model and color of Manookian’s car, the lawyer kept watch for it appearing near his property.
He did not wake up with a horse’s head in his bed, however.
As it disbarred Manookian, the Court’s opinion noted, “Victimizing the families of opposing counsel and causing well-founded concern for their well-being and safety is an especially grave offense and a profound dishonor as a lawyer. Lawyers in litigation may be expected to assume the risk of a certain amount of rough-and-tumble. Their families do not. In preying on the families of opposing counsel, Mr. Manookian crossed the Rubicon.”
Not surprisingly, it was revealed in the disbarment order that the lawyer hadn’t suddenly crossed the metaphorical Rubicon without giving plenty of signals that he was capable of it. Manookian had a history of violating the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct, defying warnings from the judiciary, and being sanctioned and suspended from the practice of law repeatedly before his latest exploits.
I’d say he just doesn’t get that “ethics” thingy. Maybe I’m being rash…
You can read about this ex-lawyer here, here and here, and then maybe you can explain to me how someone this ethically inert managed to keep his license for 17 years, and how someone like that decides to become a lawyer in the first place. Or why he thought making threats to opposing lawyers’ family members in print wouldn’t get him suspended or disbarred.
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Pointer: Alexander Cheezem
Ethics Alarms 
My jaw is on the floor. Astounding.
It actually gets worse. Jack left out what I consider the single most Kaboom-tier act in the entire affair.
He didn’t just try to blackmail his former employer with his daughter. He also tried to blackmail said former employer with misleadingly presented personal information about his son.
To wit, said son had been contacted by someone claiming to be a beautiful woman (there were photos) while he was in college. They exchanged a few e-mails, but the son got suspicious and his dad asked Manookian — still employed at his firm at the time — to investigate. Manookian discovered that the sender was actually an older man, and represented the son in the resulting lawsuit (which was eventually settled).
In his threatening e-mails, Manookian… decided to insert the matter. He discussed representing the son in a matter involving the son “exchanging sexually graphic emails with a much
older man for the sexual gratification of the older man” and inexplicably included “the heading of the case naming [the son], the court in which it was filed, the docket number, and the pleading with specific page references where the referenced sexual information could be found.” (From the decision disbarring Manookian.)
To emphasize, Manookian was aware of this information because he had been the son’s lawyer in the matter. The son was, in other words, a former client, and he was blackmailing the son with the case he had represented him in.
There’s no shortage of unethical conduct in this case, but… honestly? That one left me speechless.
Yes, thanks for adding those details, AC and you’re right—that was the worst of it, though the first part was bad enough. I was also amazed that one of the judges didn’t think this guy should be disbarred. It took me so long to unravel all of the various breaches of the ethics rules that I decided that linking to the opinion was the safest course.
You did a better job summarizing his exploitation of his former client than I would have, and also better than any of the three accounts I read. Thanks.
Makes me wonder if he was blackmailing that judge. Given the egregious violations, someone may want to investigate him as well, but going after judges based on how they decide something is a slippery slope we’d need to worry about.
Bars don’t screen for psychopaths in the admissions process.
And, the law can be attractive to people with certain anti-social traits.
I had a classmate who was very smart but also exhibited a very cynical view of people (for some lawyers, it takes an entire career o get that cynical about people).
His legal career was not long-lived. He fell behind on his rent for his office. His landlord, also a lawyer demanded payment. I think his response was literally, “chase me.” She did not chase him; she reported him (in Minnesota, at least, it is unethical not to pay expenses related to one’s legal practice).
I believe the kicker was that after being reported to the Board for some conduct, he threatened clients with deportation if they cooperated with the investigation of him (he and his spouse operated an immigration firm).
He was suspended and I do not believe he has ever applied to have the suspension lifted.
-Jut
Well, he managed to keep it up for 17 years and maybe he could have kept going longer with a little luck. So, why shouldn’t he act like this? I mean, it took 17 years before the gravy train came to an end. That is almost enough time to earn a full pension in federal government service. There really seem to be a lack of enforcement if it was allowed for so long. If these were violations of a homeowner’s association or land covenants, they would be voided due to lack of enforcement.