Bar associations are quite a bit more vigorous these days in prosecuting lawyers whose clients they disagree with politically. This explains the fury with which President Trump’s lawyers have been pursued, and why the Justice Department is trying to insulate its lawyer from the lawfare of the District of Columbia Bar. The effort is doomed; it is well established that lawyers, even government lawyers, remain accountable to their licensing associations and the bars of the jurisdictions where they practice. I sympathize with the DOJ, however.
Other than politics, what might get a lawyer punished by his or her bar is slam-dunk misconduct like stealing a client’s funds, though even that may take an absurdly long time, as in this case, where the crooked—but widely acclaimed!— lawyer was bribing bar association officials. I have been involved in an effort to get a major bar association to act regarding a predator lawyer who has been engaged in illegal activity, fraud and the violation of at least 15 Rules of Professional Conduct over more than a decade. That bar association knows me and knows that I am a legal ethics expert, yet it lost my original complaint, told me that a deadline had passed for submission of documents two days before the deadline (“This decision cannot be appealed” the letter said), and has trapped me in a series of “Catch-22s.” Meanwhile, the unethical lawyer in question continues to lie, cheat and steal, while compromising the interests and welfare of mass tort victims.
A recent report on one of the bars I belong to revealed how bad the situation is. Data analyst David Stasior writes in part,
[P]reserving the rule of law requires oversight by independent authorities like state bars. The shared, unquestioned premise is that state disciplinary systems are where lawyers are actually held to account.
Until recently, we could not practically test that assumption. State disciplinary authorities publish thousands of individual decisions as PDFs on their websites, summarizing their work only in broad annual reports. What do those thousands of documents and tens of thousands of pages reveal? Nobody had read them all.
To read those files, we first need to know how a state defines misconduct. In Massachusetts, the Rules of Professional Conduct set the boundaries. Like most states, Massachusetts follows the American Bar Association’s structure of eight major sections. The eighth is a catch-all covering the general integrity of the profession. It is used both for conduct outside law practice, such as a drunk-driving conviction, and to add weight to other violations, since any violation of the first seven sections can also count as a violation of the eighth. Because of that overlap, we set the eighth section aside for some analytic questions.
The remaining seven sections cover the distinct domains of legal practice: the client-lawyer relationship, the lawyer as counselor, the lawyer as advocate, dealings with third parties, law firms, public service, and advertising. If attorney discipline were spread evenly across these seven domains, each section would account for about 14 percent of the rules cited. But to measure the rule of law empirically, moving beyond anecdotes and courtroom dramas, we must test our assumptions against the actual record.
We used AI to read and categorize roughly 4,000 Massachusetts attorney disciplinary decisions spanning 24 years, converting unstructured text into an analyzable dataset. First, AI helped write Python code that produces deterministic results: the same code reads the same text and extracts the same data points every time. Next, we used AI to interpret passages the code could not classify with confidence and to audit the results. Finally, we checked the tables against the original PDFs by hand, returning to every decision multiple times as the analysis evolved…
The contrast between public expectation and the record is stark. The commenters on the proposed DOJ rule, for example, overwhelmingly envisioned state disciplinary authorities as the front-line defenders of the rule of law. In Massachusetts, at least, the data shows a system focused on the “business of law.” The disciplinary authority functions less like a guardian of the republic and more like a legal consumer-complaints bureau. That gap raises a thorny question: should the public expect these institutions to police the broader rule of law?
For a sharper test, consider the most fundamental requirement of the legal profession: truthfulness. The public assumes that lawyers, as officers of the court, are strictly bound to tell the truth. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court, agrees. As Justice David A. Lowy wrote in a disciplinary decision, quoting the court’s 2004 ruling in Matter of Moore, “Truthfulness and candor are the cornerstones upon which the legal profession is built.”
Precedent puts a price on violating it: a one-year suspension for a knowingly false statement made not under oath, and a two-year suspension for one made under oath.
The record tells a different story. Across decades of decisions, the sanction for dishonesty ranges from nothing to years. Sometimes a lie draws no additional discipline at all. Sometimes it is merely an aggravating factor. When dishonesty is the clear driver, the result has been an admonition, a public reprimand, or a short suspension, and only sometimes the presumptive one-year or two-year suspension.
One decision explains part of the spread. In a case involving untruthful testimony, the Board of Bar Overseers, which hears Massachusetts disciplinary cases, said it was “reticent to penalize a lawyer for defending herself at trial.” Its “indulgence is limited,” it noted, yet a record full of “blatant lies, obfuscations, and evasions” was treated only as an aggravating factor. On the Board’s own account, lying can be indulged, precedent notwithstanding.
This indulgent approach to handling dishonesty fractures our basic assumptions about the rule of law. We expect state authorities to ensure lawyers behave ethically. But if honesty, a cornerstone of the profession, according to the state’s highest court, is enforced so inconsistently, what can the public expect?
…Curiously, a coalition of attorneys general identified another “cornerstone” of legal ethics. In an amicus brief filed in July 2026, they called Rule 8.3, a lawyer’s duty to report another lawyer’s serious misconduct, “a cornerstone of the system famously referred to as ‘self-regulation.’” Our Massachusetts dataset lets us test whether this cornerstone is any sturdier than honesty.
When we ran the 4,000 Massachusetts decisions through the AI pipeline, Rule 8.3 appeared in only three. One explained why a lawyer had reported a colleague. One was a typo for Rule 8.4. The third mentioned the rule as a reference. Not one lawyer was disciplined for violating it. Expanding the search to four jurisdictions and more than 10,000 published decisions produced the same result: no attorney publicly disciplined under Rule 8.3.
These findings—the dominance of the “business of law,” the shifting standards for dishonesty, the phantom enforcement of self-regulation—were just the start. Further analysis of the Massachusetts decisions deepens the contrast between belief and reality….[T]he system almost never orders restitution for harmed clients. Mitigating and aggravating factors are applied unevenly from case to case. By the Board’s own annual reports, about 95 percent of complaints are closed without an investigation, leaving no public record.
You can read it all here. For several years I gave the ethics portion of the orientation for new Bay State bar admittees. I would give a very different program today.
I raised this problem on the listserv of the legal ethics lawyers association of which I am a member, suggesting that addressing this failure of the profession’s self-policing should be at the top of the organization’s priorities. The reaction I received was what I should have expected (see this post), but was depressing nonetheless. One prominent member said the issue was beyond the association’s purview. I quickly posted the group’s mission statement that includes “Encouraging high ethical standards across the legal profession,” musing why addressing the collapse of lawyer discipline wouldn’t be covered by that aspiration. I was then admonished for being uncivil. The over-all response was “It is what it is.” (Rationalization #41. The Evasive Tautology)
In other words, “We don’t care.” I do. So should everyone who depends on a fair and functioning legal system.
