New York Attorney Discipline Practice and Procedure 2024

Hal R. Lieberman is a partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP. For three decades, Mr. Lieberman has focused his practice on lawyers’ professional liability and ethics matters, and has helped shape the law governing lawyers. Prior to representing lawyers and law firms in private practice, he was an Assistant Bar Counsel in the Massachusetts Office of the Bar Counsel, and then served for more than 13 years as Principal Trial Attorney and Chief Counsel to the Departmental Disciplinary Committee of the New York Supreme Court, First Department.

In addition to representing lawyers and law firms, Mr. Lieberman has provided expert testimony or opinions in more than 50 civil and criminal litigations involving legal ethics or legal malpractice. He was recently an adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, for 13 years taught legal ethics at Brooklyn Law School, and served as a visiting lecturer on the topics of legal ethics and professional discipline at Harvard Law School, Fordham Law School, Hofstra Law School, Cardozo Law School, and New York Law School. Mr. Lieberman is a regular columnist for the New York Law Journal on the subject of Professional Discipline. He also publishes a blog, NYLegalEthics.attorney.

Mr. Lieberman is also actively involved in alternative dispute forums, having founded Complaint Mediation Panels of the Departmental Disciplinary Committee, the first lawyer-client dispute resolution program in the United States. He is the former Chair of the Committee on Professional Discipline of the New York City Bar, a former member of the Committee on Professional Ethics of the New York City Bar, and a member of the American Law Institute, where he served on the members’ consultative group for the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers.

Harvey Prager is an associate at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, where his work focuses on lawyers’ professional responsibility and legal ethics matters.

Mr. Prager worked for many years with Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP’s professional responsibility practice group, which represented and advised lawyers and law firms on various aspects of the law governing lawyers, with a particular emphasis on matters related to legal ethics, professional discipline, malpractice, disqualification motions, sanctions and law firm disputes. In addition, he has operated a solo practice in Boston, where he also focused on professional responsibility and ethics matters, with an emphasis on attorney disciplinary defense, bar admissions, and bar reinstatements.

Mr. Prager is admitted to practice in New York, Massachusetts, and the United States District Court, District of Massachusetts.

J. Richard Supple, Jr. is a partner at Clyde & Co US LLP. He represents law firms and lawyers in professional ethics-related matters, including disciplinary and legal malpractice cases, partnership and fee disputes, disqualification and sanctions motions, risk management advising, and internal investigations.

As a prosecutor and defense counsel, Mr. Supple has tried, arbitrated, drafted expert opinions, and litigated numerous disciplinary cases and other ethics-related matters in federal and state courts; argued appeals before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the New York Court of Appeals, and intermediate appellate courts; and successfully mediated cases throughout the United States.

Before going into private practice in 1999, Mr. Supple was Principal Trial Counsel to the Departmental Disciplinary Committee, First Department and a Staff Attorney at the Legal Aid Society. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a faculty member at the Practising Law Institute. He was Chair of the Professional Discipline Committee of the New York City Bar (2010-2013).