"Victimizing the Families of Opposing Counsel and Causing Well-Founded Concern for Their Well-Being … Is … 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."

From Manookian v. Bd. of Prof. Responsibility, decided Friday by the Tennessee Supreme Court (majority opinion by Chief Justice Holly Kirby):

In this lawyer disciplinary case, the lawyer's conduct compels disbarment. The lawyer sent a series of intimidating, demeaning, embarrassing, and harassing communications to opposing counsel and others.

Some targeted family members of opposing counsel, including one family member who was also a former client, and caused well-founded concern for their well-being and safety. In the ensuing disciplinary proceedings, a Board of Professional Responsibility hearing panel found that the purpose of the communications was to intimidate opposing counsel in order to gain unfair advantage in pending litigation. It concluded inter alia that the lawyer's conduct was prejudicial to the administration of justice, that he failed to respect the rights of third persons, and that he violated his duty to a former client, in violation of Tennessee's Rules of Professional Conduct.

The hearing panel said the presumptive sanction was disbarment, found four aggravating factors, and found no mitigating circumstances. Without explanation, the hearing panel recommended a two-year suspension instead of disbarment. The attorney appealed to the trial court. The trial court indicated that, had the Board of Professional Responsibility filed a separate petition for review, the trial court would have recommended disbarment, but because the Board did not, the trial court affirmed the sanction of suspension. Both parties appeal.

Here, the lawyer's conduct was egregious. Victimizing the families of opposing counsel and causing concern for their well-being and safety is an especially grave offense and a profound dishonor as a lawyer. The hearing panel's decision to deviate downward from the presumptive sanction of disbarment was arbitrary and capricious, and the lawyer must be disbarred. Accordingly, we modify the judgment of the hearing panel and impose the sanction of disbarment.

An excerpt from the long discussion of Manookian's misconduct:

The attorney in this case, Appellee Brian Philip Manookian, and the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility ("Board" or "BPR"), both appeal discipline imposed by the BPR hearing panel for communications by Mr. Manookian to opposing counsel in Mr. Manookian's representation of a client in pending civil litigation….

In mid-July 2017, the lawyers representing [a litigation adversary of Mr. Manookian's] in Shao withdrew. In their stead, Mr. Manookian's former employer C. J. Gideon was substituted as counsel, along with another lawyer in Mr. Gideon's law firm. Mr. Gideon began evaluating the plaintiff's outstanding discovery responses. On August 17, 2017, Mr. Gideon sent a letter to Mr. Manookian and the other lawyers in the Shao case detailing "continuing deficiencies in the plaintiff's response" to discovery requests propounded on Mr. Manookian's client and asking plaintiff's counsel to supplement them.

Two days later, on Saturday August 19 at 9:29 p.m., Mr. Manookian sent an email from his law firm email address to Mr. Gideon at his law firm email address:

Clarence –

I hear [name of Mr. Gideon's daughter] is working at [name of daughter's employer]. What a fantastic opportunity; particularly given her history of academic failure and alcohol and substance abuse.

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.

I am reminded that it is good for us to keep apprised of each other's lives and the things we can do to influence them….

Mr. Manookian's email, Mr. Gideon later explained, brought him back to the worst time in his and his wife's life. On her eighteenth birthday during her high school senior year, Mr. Gideon's daughter drank some wine before going to school and was suspended for it. This incident occurred while Mr. Manookian was employed by Mr. Gideon's firm. It resulted in Mr. Gideon's daughter leaving high school to attend a six-week camp in the mountains. Mr. Gideon later said he had not spoken to Mr. Manookian about this.

Mr. Gideon characterized the description in Mr. Manookian's email of Mr. Gideon's daughter having a history of academic failure as "[a]bsolutely a lie." He did not dispute the incident with alcohol but said his daughter had a 4.0 GPA when she left that high school and enrolled in another school, and that she ultimately graduated from college.

Mr. Gideon said Mr. Manookian's email made him sick to his stomach and angry that "anybody would be so low to attack an opponent through their kids." He said it provoked "unbelievable anxiety over what [Mr. Manookian] was going to do to my daughter" and a helpless feeling that "I wouldn't be able to do anything about it." Mr. Gideon saw the intent of the email as a "brushback pitch to get me to back off" in the Shao litigation, to send the message: "Don't be so vigorous in defending these people against their claims."

The following Monday, Mr. Gideon filed a complaint with the BPR against Mr. Manookian for the August 19 email about his daughter. The same week, Mr. Gideon filed a motion in Shao for sanctions against Mr. Manookian. He attached the offending email to his motion, but to protect his daughter's privacy, he redacted identifying information about her and about her employer.

Mr. Manookian's response filed with the trial court claimed innocuous intentions. He said the company that employed Mr. Gideon's daughter was one of Mr. Manookian's clients and included some of his close friends. He explained that he spoke with the daughter's employer and then "emailed Clarence Gideon on August 19, 2017 regarding [the daughter's] position at [employer] stating, 'I will make it a point to see what I can do regarding her prospects there.'"

Inconsonant with Mr. Manookian's claimed good intentions, however, his response to the motion for sanctions included the identifying information Mr. Gideon had redacted, such as the name of Mr. Gideon's daughter and the name of her employer, and it attached an unredacted copy of the offending email. And for good measure, an exhibit to Mr. Manookian's filed response also included the same email, unredacted, for a second time.

Going still further, Mr. Manookian inserted into his filed response a footnote ["Footnote 1"] that contained information about Mr. Gideon's son, whom Mr. Manookian had represented on a sensitive sexual matter while he was employed by Mr. Gideon's firm:

Mr. Manookian's prior experience with Mr. Gideon's adult children is limited to having successfully represented his adult son in a matter involving Mr. Gideon's adult son exchanging sexually graphic emails with a much older man for the sexual gratification of the older man.

The footnote included detail such as the heading of the case naming Mr. Gideon's 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. Mr. Manookian's filed response did not explain how the information in Footnote 1 related to the subject matter of Mr. Gideon's motion for sanctions.

Mr. Gideon later explained that, in 2008 or 2009, while Mr. Gideon's son was in college, the son was contacted over the internet by someone who claimed to be a woman and sent the son photographs of a beautiful woman represented to be the sender. Mr. Gideon's son thought it was odd and "too good to be true" and showed his father the photographs. Mr. Gideon said he did not know the term "catfishing" at the time, but he sensed something amiss. At the time, Mr. Manookian was still employed by Mr. Gideon's firm, and he had often described himself as very knowledgeable about the internet. Mr. Gideon solicited Mr. Manookian's help for his son.

After investigating, Mr. Manookian determined the sender was a man, not the beautiful woman depicted in the photos. Mr. Manookian located the man, sued him on behalf on Mr. Gideon's son, and the matter was concluded by the defendant paying a financial settlement. Though the lawsuit was not sealed, Mr. Gideon said it never made any headlines, few people knew about it, and it "certainly wasn't in the public domain." He said neither he nor his son heard another word about the matter until Mr. Manookian inserted it into the Shao litigation.

Mr. Gideon pointed out that his son had nothing to do with the Shao case, his daughter's employment, or the subject matter of the motion for sanctions against Mr. Manookian. Mr. Gideon said Mr. Manookian's description of the son's lawsuit was "written to make it look like my son was knowingly communicating with a guy for their joint mutual sexual satisfaction. That's not right. That's not accurate." He viewed Mr. Manookian's act of inserting the son's lawsuit into his response as done "to take a shot at me and to embarrass a former client and in that sense get back at me yet again."

Judge Brothers held a hearing on September 21, 2017 on Mr. Gideon's motion for sanctions. At the hearing, Mr. Manookian explained that his email to Mr. Gideon about Mr. Gideon's daughter was intended to convey only that Mr. Manookian intended to help Mr. Gideon's daughter….

Judge Brothers declined to credit Mr. Manookian's explanation. Instead, Judge Brothers viewed the email as a "thinly veiled threat." He likened Mr. Manookian's email to a scene "in a gangster movie" where a "mobster" says "just want to let you know, I know where you live, I know where your children go to school … and I know what kind of car you drive" and adds "y'all have a great day" before he walks away.

The Tennessee Supreme Court went through a long analysis of these and other misbehaviors, rejected Manookian's First Amendment arguments (concluding that lawyers' speech in the course of litigation that sufficiently interfered with the administration of justice could be restricted), and concluded that the Board erred in imposing a sentence short of disbarment. An excerpt:

As we consider the propriety of the sanction, several aspects of Mr. Manookian's misconduct deserve particular comment. First, to say that Mr. Manookian engaged in multiple offenses is to understate. 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….

Mr. Manookian engaged in this long pattern of intimidating and degrading conduct in order to succeed in Shao by coercing opposing counsel into standing down to avoid personal humiliation and emotional distress for them or their families. A business model of sorts, based on fear.

The length to which Mr. Manookian went to obtain detailed private information about opposing counsel also warrants comment. Mr. Manookian explained he used tracking applications imbedded into routine litigation email to give him detailed personal information about each person who opened the email, followed by a second service used by private investigators to obtain an even greater level of private information. Mr. Manookian's matter-of-fact testimony almost made it sound as though using private-investigator-level intrusive tools on everyday litigation correspondence to secretly extract private information to weaponize against opposing counsel is normal business behavior for a lawyer. It is not.

Most important, 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.

The subversive impact of Mr. Manookian's conduct on the justice system cannot be overstated. Were we to permit such conduct to go unchecked, lawyers would flee the profession rather than risk personal mortification or the welfare of their families….

Finally, the record in this case offers no encouragement that Mr. Manookian would benefit from suspension and change his ways upon reinstatement. Apart from the misconduct in Shao, the record indicates Mr. Manookian drew findings by many judges that he engaged in fraudulent, threatening or demeaning conduct, or conduct that endangered the public or abused the judicial process….

Justice Sharon Lee dissented; here's her introduction:

While this Court has inherent jurisdiction over attorney disciplinary matters, attorneys must be afforded fair notice and an opportunity to be heard. For the first time, this Court has increased an attorney's discipline through the exercise of the Court's inherent jurisdiction outside of the process outlined in Rule 9 by disbarring Brian Philip Manookian without giving fair notice of its intent.