Foley lawyer survives punishment from US Supreme Court

A lawyer who faced a possible sanction from the US Supreme Court for submitting a petition to the court that was allegedly not written in “plain terms” has escaped punishment.

In a decision published yesterday (March 23), the US Supreme Court said it will not take further action against Howard Shipley, but reminded him that petitions should be written in “ plain terms” and that lawyers “may not delegate that responsibility to the client”.

The case was brought to light when, in December last year, the Supreme Court said that the petition was unclear and that too much of its content was written by Shipley’s client.

Shipley, a partner at law firm Foley & Lardner, claimed the petition was largely written by his client, Sigram Schindler.

Schindler was appealing against a US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision which had denied him a patent for an invention covering artificial intelligence.

The petition was submitted to the Supreme Court on October 6 last year and was denied a hearing by the court the following December.

Under section 8.2 of the rules of the Supreme Court of the US, it states that: “The court may take any appropriate disciplinary action against any attorney who is admitted to practice before it for conduct unbecoming a member of the bar”.

According to the Scotus blog, which covers Supreme Court cases, in the last 50 years only one lawyer has been directly punished by the court.

Last month, Paul Clement, a partner at law firm Bancroft and who responded on behalf of Shipley to the disciplinary threat, said Shipley acted in “ good faith” in submitting the petition for Schindler, who had “deeply held views” about patent law.

Shipley had to “reconcile the competing demands of the duty of loyalty that he owed his client and the duty that he owed the Supreme Court,” Clement said.

“The result is an unorthodox petition that clearly and faithfully reflects the views of the client, right down to the client’s favoured locutions and acronyms employed in his other writings about the patent system,” he added.

Linda Yun, a spokesperson for Foley & Lardner, said:  “We are pleased with and respect the court’s decision regarding this highly unusual matter.”

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