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Linda Donnelly is what you could call a lawyer cop. As head of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel for the Colorado Supreme Court, she’s charged with making sure the 20,376 attorneys who belong to the Colorado Bar are respectable, upright citizens who zealously represent their clients without robbing them blind. During her sixteen-year tenure, she estimates that she’s been involved in the prosecution of about 5,000 of Colorado’s not-so-finest in the legal profession.
One would think that, as a prosecutor of wayward attorneys, Donnelly would have a pristine legal background.
But three years before she took the job, Donnelly herself broke some rules. In a courtroom, no less. During a civil case in which a collection agency was suing Donnelly for nonpayment of a loan, she failed to appear in court three times, prompting the judge to issue a citation for her to “come and show why she should not be held in contempt.”
The contempt citation was issued in February 1976, after a default judgment already had been entered against Donnelly. The collection agency was trying to get the young attorney to appear before the court in order to ascertain how she would pay the $1,594 judgment entered against her. When Donnelly did not appear for the original hearing and then ignored a citation to appear at a follow-up “Rule 69” proceeding (in which a debtor’s assets are determined), the contempt citation was issued.
Donnelly, now 48, says she has no recollection at all of the proceedings or what would have caused her to pull two no-shows in a row. The file does not indicate that she appeared in response to the contempt citation. Instead, another Rule 69 citation was issued on July 21, 1976. As it turns out, Donnelly did not have to appear in response to the third citation; she filed for bankruptcy in September of that year, which “stayed” all the proceedings against her.
Donnelly’s failure to appear in court after successive citations did not delay judgment of the case against her, but it did successfully drag out the extraction of payment of that judgment for one full year–at which time she finally filed bankruptcy and ended up paying $9.82 of the $1,594 judgment against her.
In a four-page letter to Westword, Donnelly –who now makes $79,000 a year–admits to failing to appear in answer to the first citation but argues that since there was no record of a contempt proceeding, she must have resolved the issue informally with the court (although she has no recollection of doing so). Besides, she says, “no lawyer has been disciplined for a single failure to appear in a case which may have resulted in the issuance of a contempt citation.” However, in a telephone interview, Donnelly does say that she remembers a case where an attorney who repeatedly failed to appear and thus caused numerous delays was ultimately prosecuted and publicly censured.
When asked whether he thought this past action should concern the court, especially in light of the job Donnelly holds, Supreme Court Justice William H. Erickson declined comment.
