FOLLOW US

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.

The majority's recommendation for a six-month suspension next goes before the Board of Bar Overseers, which will decide what sanction to recommend for the Supreme Judicial Court to impose.

Counsel for Bradley declined to comment when reached Monday. Representatives for the Board of Bar Overseers were not immediately available for comment.

Thornton, Labaton Sucharow LLP and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP were awarded $75 million in fees in 2016 from State Street Corp.'s $300 million settlement of claims that it cheated its customers out of millions by manipulating exchange rates on foreign exchange trades.

Allegations of double-billing and inflated hourly rates for counsel sparked a thorough review by the federal court — including the appointment of a special master — and concluded with the eight-figure fee award being slashed by $15 million.

A partner and co-counsel in the case, Bradley on Sept. 14, 2016, approved the firm's calculation of its legal services and costs that would go along with documents from the two other firms for the court to calculate the lodestar amount.

But Thornton's papers included inaccurate hourly rates and claimed attorney Michael Bradley — Garrett Bradley's brother — was a Thornton employee who billed $500 per hour, when he was neither employed by the firm nor billed that much. Garrett Bradley later testified the errors were a "stupid mistake."

In a dissent from the majority decision, committee member Richard Mackenzie said Bradley should face the presumptive two-year suspension for attorneys who knowingly make a false statement to a court under oath.

Mackenzie wrote that Bradley's testimony denying that he read the document isn't enough to establish that he never read and didn't know the false representations contained in the declaration, which Bradley had certified was "true and correct."

"Any reasonable attorney — particularly a managing partner — who was even mildly interested in the firm's support for a request for a multi-million-dollar fee that his firm was seeking to be awarded, would have read it," the dissent said.

The declaration also coincided with Bradley's elevation to managing partner of Thornton about two weeks prior, Mackenzie noted.

"I do not believe that one of the respondent's first acts as managing partner of his firm would be to sign a short affidavit, where his firm sought a multi-million-dollar fee, without reading all of it," the dissent said. "I, therefore, do not credit that the respondent did not read the entirety of the two pages of content."

The majority decision found Bradley violated professional rules requiring reasonable diligence and committed misconduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice and adversely reflects on his fitness to practice law.