Legal Ethics and the Independence of State Bar Investigations

By Ann Woolner for the Georgia Lawyers for the Rule of Law

Lawyers know it’s not enough to please whoever employed them. Whether an individual, a corporation, a group or a government, the client must be zealously represented, to be sure. Just not too zealously.

Lawyers can’t lie, cheat or steal, even if their clients would benefit, even if their clients want them to. If they do, they could learn there are more important people to satisfy than their clients, namely, state legal ethics enforcers.

If lawyers violate the ethical rules they swore to uphold when the state granted their licenses to practice, they risk punishment up to being tossed out of the profession. Here, the State Bar of Georgia investigates complaints of ethical violations by lawyers and recommends what, if any, penalty the state Supreme Court should impose.

That goes for all lawyers licensed or practicing law in Georgia, no matter where they work, or for whom.

Federal law requires government lawyers to comply with the ethics rules in the states in which they are practicing just as all lawyers licensed by those states are required to do. If they violate a State’s ethical rules, government lawyers can face disciplinary sanctions just like other lawyers licensed by the state.

Current leaders of the U.S. Department of Justice believe that state agencies that investigate allegations of ethical misconduct by lawyers should not be allowed the first shot at determining whether DOJ lawyers violate ethics rules. Instead, the agency is proposing a rule to let the U.S. Attorney General investigate alleged ethical wrongdoing by DOJ lawyers first, before the state disciplinary authority steps in. In effect, the DOJ seeks to delay the process by first investigating itself. The rule would allow DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility to take as long as it deems necessary to investigate allegations of lawyer misconduct. There is no time limit on these internal investigations. The rule could be used to, in effect, grant immunity from disciplinary action for ethical violations for errant lawyers who represent the United States of America.

“If the purpose of it is delay, and to avoid a reckoning for a lawyer who lies, that’s a shame,” says Paula Frederick, former General Counsel for the State Bar of Georgia and, as such, its chief legal ethics investigator. “That’s what it looks like.”

The proposal comes at a time when a number of Trump administration’s most highly ranked lawyers are the subjects of bar complaints. The proposed rule itself points out that bar complaints have been lodged against “the Deputy Attorney General, the former Acting Deputy Attorney General, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division, and the former interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, as well as career Department of Justice attorneys.”

The DOJ blames the plethora of bar complaints on the accusers, not the accused. It blames “political activists” and their “unprecedented weaponization of the State bar complaint.”

It would seem that weaponization is in the eye of the beholder.

The bar complaints and the proposed rule change come amid an unprecedented level of distrust in the truthfulness of DOJ lawyers, as stated by judges across the country.

In Oregon, for example, Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, found that the administration’s claims that National Guard troops were needed in Portland “was simply untethered to the facts.” In court orders from a growing number of courts, judges assess evidence and find that the administration’s assertions can’t be trusted.

“If you’ve got a lawyer who a court has sanctioned for lying or was called out in an order for ‘gaslighting’,… and that lawyer continues to practice seemingly without any repercussions, it jeopardizes everything the profession is about,” says Frederick. “It’s supposed to be about a search for the truth”, she says.

So are investigations into lawyer misconduct. The Department of Justice makes it clear by its own words that it is incapable of unbiased self-examination. Its proposed rule change says, “Even more troubling than the recent spate of State bar complaints is the willingness of some State bar disciplinary authorities to give credence to such complaints.”

Somebody needs to.

Please submit your comment about the proposed rule to the Federal Register by April 6:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/05/2026-04390/review-of-state-bar-complaints-and-allegations-against-department-of-justice-attorneys

Ann Woolner retired as a legal affairs columnist for Bloomberg News and, before that, for American Lawyer Media which includes The Daily Report in Atlanta. She is not a lawyer.