A Lawyer Was Found Guilty of Misconduct 10 Times. She Was Still Practising

• Attorney Samuels was found guilty of misconduct nine prior times
• She initially claimed she couldn’t remember any of them
• She’s now separately charged with fraudulent conversion
• The GLC has defended its own role in letting her keep practising

An attorney identified only as Samuels admitted during a General Legal Council disciplinary hearing that she had been found guilty of professional misconduct nine previous times, after initially claiming she could not remember, according to a hearing transcript reviewed by the Sunday Gleaner. The latest finding, her tenth, stemmed from a case involving client Silvera, who grew suspicious enough to independently contact the Titles Office, the Supreme Court and the Trelawny Parish Court and discovered that probate had never actually been granted on the estate at issue.

It was during the Silvera hearing that Samuels first offered an explanation for missing documents: that Silvera’s paperwork had been inside her car when it was stolen, a claim offered specifically in response to questions about why the attorney had failed to properly handle the client’s matter.

Less than two weeks after that finding, Samuels was separately charged by the Fraud Squad with one count of fraudulent conversion, accused of failing to hand over $8.2 million collected from a property sale to a client. She was arrested after a near two-hour standoff with police in downtown Montego Bay and released on a $4 million bail package with strict reporting conditions. Her attorney, Donnovan Collins, maintained her innocence: based on my client’s instructions, she has not fraudulently converted any money for any client. But we await our day in court when the truth will come to light.

The headline fact, ten separate misconduct findings against a single practising attorney, raises the obvious institutional question this publication has not seen fully answered: what threshold, if any, actually triggers disbarment rather than a repeated pattern of findings that allow an attorney to continue accepting new clients, and new property transactions, after each one.

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