From what you say about the court proceedings, the only thing that seems unusual is the woman not being successful on the application the other party did not attend for, but that looks like it got sorted out on appeal.

There is nothing strange about abandoning a claim because it is not supported by the evidence. The lawyer would probably have drafted it based mainly on what his client told him. If the client is a litigious alcoholic, it’s not shocking the claims turned out to be unfounded. If that’s what happened, it would be uncommon, and in most situations unethical, to give a reason why the allegations were abandoned. (Unethical because it would be a breach of the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality to the son.)

The woman the article is about sounds like a relatively common client I find when I volunteer at a pro bono law clinic. In most cases when someone comes in who parted ways with numerous other lawyers, and has wild complaints against opposing counsel, it is because she’s a difficult client. A lawyer certainly wouldn’t walk away from a case where his fee was guaranteed by the estate because he was intimidated by opposing counsel.

A number of of the allegations she makes, although I have no doubt she sincerely believes them, are extremely implausible. It is ridiculous that she was interviewed for 5 hours and not allowed a drink of water. The claim that her brother’s lawyer sent the brother’s ex-girlfriend to the mother’s house (to do what, exactly) is simply paranoid.

Many of the other claims, while not inherently unbelievable, are inconsistent. For example, if the process in the ethics complaint against the lawyer were as hopelessly biased as you claim, why was it “obvious that he was prolonging the case to forestall the
redocketing of her ethics grievance”? Why would he want to delay that if the outcome was inevitably going to be in his favour?

Complaints that the son’s lawyer “refused to respond to requests to help get the son out of the house and
stop the looting” are misguided. It’s entirely possible the lawyer did do this — but the only ethically way to do so is in private. The son’s lawyer could never tell her or her lawyer about it, because doing so would breach confidentiality.

To be honest, the only time in the story a lawyer’s behavior seems dubious to me (aside from the billing issues) is the lawyer who drafted the will, who was probably in a conflict of interest and should not have accepted the daughter’s case. That is especially true if he was negligent preparing the will, which is the only superficially plausible allegation of malpractice in the entire article (although I don’t know anything about NJ estate law, so I have no opinion on the merits of that).

The complaint should have been sustained based on the copious evidence that I saw. It was not because in New Jersey lawyers frequently can get away with anything short of blue-blooded murder and they know it.

So what is there? Leaving aside the rhetoric and unsupported allegations all there is to the story is that one of the parties to litigation over an estate wasn’t happy with the outcome. So she filed a complaint against the opposing lawyer which wasn’t substantiated (probably because the investigator couldn’t find any evidence of misconduct, just like there’s none in the article).

If the point is that litigation can be financially and emotionally draining, that’s true. But ultimately, the decision to litigate is in the hands of clients, not lawyer.