Illinois Disciplinary board granted authority to investigate, prosecute unauthorized practice of law

Illinois Lawyer Now is reporting that, earlier this week, the Illinois Supreme Court granted the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) the authority to investigate and prosecute the unauthorized practice of law.

I have to say I found this surprising in the sense that I thought the ARDC already had that authority.  The ARDC is the disciplinary agency in the state and given that unauthorized practice of law is an ethical violation, you would think that it has the authority to deal with such cases.  Well, apparently, it didn't, but now it does.

But maybe I should not be surprised.  A couple of years ago, I posted a comment about a case that interpreted the notion of illegal practice of law in Illinois which I found odd.  I promised myself I would do some research on the question, but never got around to it.  Maybe now I will....

That case from two years ago was People v Harris, in which the Court of Appeals affirmed a conviction of a law school graduate who was not admitted to practice in Illinois for "false personation of an attorney."

Here is what I wrote back then:

The applicable statute in the case  reads as follows: “A person who falsely represents himself or herself to be an attorney authorized to practice law for purposes of compensation or consideration commits a Class 4 felony. This subsection (a) does not apply to a person who unintentionally fails to pay attorney registration fees established by Supreme Court Rule.”

The defendant argued that because the statute does not specify that he must be authorized to practice law in Illinois, he did not violate the law if he was licensed in any one state or jurisdiction. I would have thought this argument to be absurd; why would you have an illegal practice of law statute if it wasn't to penalize people who are not authorized to practice law in the state? Yet, by comparing the statute that was repealed when this one was enacted, the court concluded that the defendant was correct. It concluded that "[t]he current statute indicates the legislature’s intent to exclude authorized attorneys from other jurisdictions from the statute’s reach."

This interpretation strikes me as very odd. It means that an attorney not admitted to practice law in Illinois who was practicing law in Illinois would not be in violation of the statute as long as he was admitted to practice somewhere else. In other words, if an attorney admitted in any other state but not in Illinois came to Illinois and ran an office in Illinois to provide legal services to Illinois clients, the state could not argue that he was practicing law illegally in Illinois.

Isn't that the "definition" of practicing law illegally in a jurisdiction? Am I missing something here?

After giving the defendant this small victory, however, the court went on to affirm the conviction finding that there was no credible evidence to suggest that he was in fact admitted anywhere else and there was clear evidence that he was not admitted in two of the four jurisdictions he claimed he had been admitted to.

The court also rejected the defendant's argument that the statute does not apply to law school graduates with legal experience. He argued that law school graduates have legal training and thus are not falsely representing themselves as attorneys.

Now, this one is absurd! He actually argued that a law graduate would not be guilty of practicing law illegally because he was a law graduate. I guess he missed that little detail about having to pass the bar exam to be allowed to practice law... The court rejected the argument.

The opinion is available here.