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Alex Jones's Lawyer Norm Pattis Suspended From Practicing Law, Discovers There's Something Worse Than Losing A Billion Dollars For Your Client On Live TV

Turns out there are worse things than getting a billion-dollar verdict against your client on national television.

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Yesterday, Alex Jones’s infamous defense lawyer Norm Pattis was suspended from the practice of law for six months after he failed to safeguard the Sandy Hook plaintiffs’ personal records.

Or, as he put it, he got “deleted.”

Umm,  sir, the correct term is “cancel culture.”

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis suspended Pattis for his failure to protect the Connecticut plaintiffs’ personal records along with a mountain of other discovery from the case, leading to the infamous confrontation when Texas attorney Mark Bankston revealed to Jones that his lawyer Andino Reynal had sent over the entire contents of Jones’s phone.

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To call the entire sequence of events that led up to that moment a clusterfuck would be a major understatement.

It started in April when Jones placed three worthless shell companies in bankruptcy in a briefly successful bid to delay the first Sandy Hook defamation trial. During that proceeding, Kyung Lee, the attorney for the companies, emailed Pattis and Jones’s former lawyer Jay Wolman seeking some emails related to his representation.

Wolman, who had been off the Connecticut case for some time, said that he’d forwarded an external hard drive with all the collected evidence to Pattis in March, cautioning that some of it was subject to a protective order. Lee’s associate then responded to the group with a copy of the order, highlighting the language which restricted access to the Connecticut plaintiffs’ medical, financial, and employment records to attorneys only. Pattis (or his associate) then forwarded the entire drive to Lee, without removing any protected documents, and with no instruction on how to comply with the court’s order.

At the same time, Andino Reynal, the tenth attorney defending Jones in the Texas Sandy Hook suit, asked Pattis to send him Jones’s texts. Pattis then instructed Lee to give Reynal the hard drive. Neither Lee nor Pattis appears to have told Reynal about the protective order before he uploaded the entire drive to his server.

On July 22, Reynal told his assistant to email Bankston a link to some document. Instead, the assistant made the entire contents of the hard drive available to counsel for the Texas plaintiffs, after which Bankston sent this message to Reynal:

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I forwarded this email to my paralegal to download this production. He asked me to take a look because it was a huge amount of material he was downloading, and he wanted me to verify that he needed to download all of it. I looked through the directories and they seemed to contain a lot of confidential information, such as depositions and records relating to the Lafferty plaintiffs, and material which appears to be work product or confidential. My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.

Reynal replied with a message telling Bankston to “disregard” the link, which he told his assistant to deactivate. He made no request for Bankston to delete what he’d already downloaded, which he had 10 days to do under Texas statute.

In the downloaded materials, Bankston discovered that Jones had lied in discovery when he said he didn’t use email or rely on Google analytics, leading to that amazing “Perry Mason moment” in open court. Approximately five minutes after that scene, Pattis emailed Chris Mattei, attorney for the Connecticut plaintiffs, saying, “Chris. Give me a call. I learned moments ago that I may have violated protective order. Norm.”

Mattei was well aware of the violation, since, he, like half the lawyers in America, had watched the scene unfold on live TV. And anyway, Bankston had already told him about the cock up. Pattis conceded that it was his fault, and that he’d released protected materials to Lee and Reynal, neither of whom were attorneys of record. But he insisted it was no harm, no foul because Reynal was “working on the defense of this and related cases.”

US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez later removed Lee from the subsequent bankruptcy case filed by Infowars parent company Free Speech Systems for failing to disclose that he’d negotiated for the LLCs and Infowars simultaneously. Reynal faced sanctions motions in Texas. And Pattis and Reynal, who entered a limited appearance in Connecticut (after he’d already accessed the parties’ files), faced sanctions in Judge Bellis’s courtroom.

Which brings us to yesterday, when Judge Bellis dropped the hammer on Pattis.

First she reminded him that he’d already gotten dinged during discovery for “cavalier actions and willful misconduct” when he improperly disclosed the plaintiffs’ personal records during a motion to depose Hillary Clinton. She went on to hold that Pattis violated several Rules of Professional Conduct, including, Rule 1.1 Competence, Rule 1.15 Safekeeping Property, Rule 3.4 Fairness to Opposing Party and Counsel, Rule 5.1 Responsibilities of Partners, Managers, and Supervising Lawyers, and Rule 8.4 Misconduct.

Among the aggravating factors, the court noted that Pattis already got dinged in this very case with regard to an affidavit in which the Danbury District Grievance Panel determined the attorney was “sloppy” and “exercised bad judgment.” Similarly, the vulnerability of the plaintiffs, Pattis’s invocation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when questioned by Disciplinary Counsel, and Pattis’s 30 years practicing law were black marks against him.

“Simply put, given his experience, there is no acceptable excuse for his misconduct,” she wrote.

Pattis has vowed to appeal. But in the meantime, he’s representing Proud Boy Joe Biggs who faces trial next week in DC on charges of seditious conspiracy for his actions on January 6, 2021. Be there, will be wild.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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