A Massachusetts disciplinary committee has recommended a six-month suspension for the former managing partner of Thornton Law Firm LLP for his alleged neglect in signing an inflated attorney fees declaration in a class action against State Street.
Two members of a Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers hearing committee recommended that Garrett J. Bradley be sidelined for half a year because the declaration he submitted to a Boston federal judge at the closing of the class action included rates that inflated the firm’s fee for the case, according to the May 20 order.
The majority’s proposed sanction is lighter than the two-year suspension requested by the bar counsel due to its acceptance of Bradley’s testimony that he saw the declaration as largely boilerplate language and signed it without reading it.
“The majority of the committee does not find that he knew — at the time he signed the declaration and allowed it to be filed on behalf of his firm — that anything in his declaration was not accurate,” committee chair Dustin F. Hecker and member Christine Kingston wrote for the majority.
