A consumer attorney who failed to communicate settlement offers in a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case has agreed to have his license to practice law revoked.
Ernest P. Francis will be disbarred on March 23, according to an order from the Virginia State Bar Disciplinary Board.
Francis had previously been fined $85,000 for not reporting the settlement offers. He said he did not report the settlement offers to his client because he considered them to be a preliminary negotiation and that he had an agreement with the plaintiff that no offer would be accepted unless it included full attorney’s fees for defending the original collection lawsuit. Francis said he and the plaintiff had an “understanding” that he was authorized to reject any offer that did not include sufficient attorneys’ fees, but there was no written documentation of the agreement and the plaintiff denied that any such agreement had been reached.
The plaintiff said he had no contact with Francis after an FDCPA suit against a credit card company was filed until one week before the plaintiff’s deposition. During his deposition, the plaintiff testified he had no interest in pursuing the litigation against the credit card company, had suffered no harm that would justify the litigation, that he did not want relief, and had no interest in pursuing the suit any further. When his deposition was over, the plaintiff fired Francis and accepted the defendant’s settlement offer in which it promised not to purse the plaintiff for fees and costs.
Francis graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1984 and had been practicing law for 36 years. He had been involved in a number of FDCPA cases against collection agencies.
He was found by a District Court judge in Virginia to have “unreasonably and vexatiously” multiplied the proceedings in the underlying suit against the credit card company by rejecting settlement offers without first informing his client. Francis was also found to have made threats against the defendant and his lawyer and said he would pursue bar complaints against them.
