Virginia State Bar suspends Lynchburg lawyer’s license
The Virginia State Bar has suspended a Lynchburg lawyer’s license to practice for a month because he did not follow accounting rules.
According to a statement from the bar, Peter C. Sackett’s suspension began Monday.
“The suspension … resulted from Mr. Sackett’s failure to comply with the terms of a public reprimand issued October 12, 2007,” the statement read. “He must employ a certified public accountant to bring his accounts into compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct or his license will be suspended for one year.”
Last year’s reprimand came from an investigation that started when American National Bank and Trust Co. sent overdraft notices to the state bar from Sackett’s account. According to the bar’s report, the trust account was overdrawn in mid-January 2007 for $760 and $1,542. Larry Palmer, clerk of the circuit court in Lynchburg, also reported Sackett gave him a bad check for a $551 court fee.
In both cases, the bar reported, Sackett covered the deficits when notified.
The report also notes that a bar investigator found other “instances since May 2006” in which Sackett’s real estate trust account was overdrawn. The investigation further found that Sackett kept incomplete and handwritten ledgers, apparently for real estate transactions, but concluded that clients had not been harmed by the record keeping or that Sackett was using the accounts for anything inappropriate.
During the initial investigation, Sackett’s license was revoked for three weeks in May and June 2007 for failing to provide investigators documentation for his bank accounts.
After the bar’s reprimand last October, Sackett was supposed to hire a certified public accountant to get his books in order. That didn’t happen, according to the bar, which led to the latest month-long suspension.
“This brought to light issues with a trust account that were supposed to be being addressed by my assistant,” Sackett said Wednesday.
Although he thought he was complying with the ruling, it was his responsibility to oversee that, he said. Since it didn’t happen, he agreed to “take a seat on the sidelines for 30 days,” he said.
Reader Reactions
My entry correcting your ignorance makes me “sound” like a gutless lawyer? That is truly fascinating, how you are able to characterize a person based on a few written words. You are the joke. Everybody hates lawyers until they need one.
Yes, I do still think the VA Bar is a joke. There are 1000’s of gutless lawyers in the state, you sound like one of them, that file Frivolous lawsuits, one after the other, but they are rarely punished. I know several of them and they too laugh at the VA Bar.
Nookly23, you admit that maybe you are missing something, but then you confidently conclude that the VA State Bar is a joke. You might want to read up on the ethics rules for lawyers in Virginia before passing judgment. What you are missing is that a lawyer’s trust account should NEVER be overdrawn, for whatever reason (even if an innocent mistake), and that a lawyer is subject to discipline if that does happen. Do you still think the VA State Bar is a joke?
If there is money in a trust account it is not earned, therefore it should never ever be overdrawn. It is also lack of character when you are uttering checks. Lawyers need to do more to uphold image.
Failure to keep accurate books is a suspendable offense.
Perhaps the Virginia Bar Association will take a hard look at Wolpoff and Abramson (HQ Maryland, license in VA), for filing 286,000+ falsified notorized documents in courts in 40 states, during the same time period.
These falsified documents resulted in them winning over 98% of the cases that were sent to court.
It seems fradulent that a Attorney firm can create Mortgage companies, and debt collection companies, act as a bank loaning money, create their own contracts, then walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars that was not due to them.
But yet our system has done nothing to them.
Maybe I am missing something, but i do not see what he did wrong. The Va state bar is a joke.
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