Ignoring disbarment, incompetence and theft get Miami to Palm Beach lawyers disciplined
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After a month with no attorneys from Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach or Monroe counties on the Florida Bar’s monthly list of attorneys disciplined by the state Supreme Court, South Florida had four of the nine on the list that came out on Friday.
In alphabetical order...
Brett Elam, West Palm Beach
Brett Elam (admitted in 2002) shouldn’t have been practicing law after an emergency suspension went into effect March 8, 2018. Elam did.
He shouldn’t have been practicing law after his March 28, 2019 disbarment for misappropriating a client’s funds for his own personal use, then not obeying court orders. The Bar said Elam kept giving legal advice and, essentially, practicing law until May 31, 2020.
So, now, Elam’s permanently disbarred.
Gary Grant, Boca Raton
Gary Grant was admitted to the Bar in 2017, admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in 2018 and was only on his third federal case in 2020 when, the court said, he “acted with incompetence and made misstatements and baseless arguments in pleadings to the court.”
Grant didn’t argue his screwups, but, in a guilty plea for consent judgment, said his “mistakes were due to a lack of competence rather than any intentional misrepresentation.”
Grant got publicly reprimanded.
Brandon Labiner, Boca Raton
Brandon Labiner (admitted 2016) has filed a Bar complaint against his father, Paul Labiner, alleging Paul stole money from him to try to replace what a bookkeeper embezzled from them. But, first, Paul filed a Bar complaint and a civil lawsuit that says his son ripped off over $450,000 from the trust account Paul set up for his wife, Brandon’s mother.
The Bar filed for and received Brandon Labiner’s emergency suspension.
Jonathan Morton, Miami
The Florida Bar profile for Jonathan Morton (admitted in 2008) says Morton is “retired.”
The state Supreme Court says he’s suspended for 18 months, starting April 1. This is a reciprocal action after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suspended him for 24 months in April 2022.
The Bar said the federal agency suspended Morton for his “failure to limit the volume of his trademark practice to an amount for whom he could provide competent representation. Morton’s grossly inflated clientele resulted in his failure to properly review each application prior to filing, as well as his failure to conduct required pre-filing inquiries, despite his certification that he had done so.”
