Lawyer Agrees to Suspension for Sexual Involvements
A Pennsylvania lawyer agreed to a three-year suspension of his law license after admitting to sexual involvement with a client and a woman he encountered in the course of his practice.
Timothy Reitz of Lycoming County entered into a Joint Petition for Discipline on Consent with Disciplinary Counsel in which he admitted that he had engaged in sexual interactions with the two women.
One was a client whom he was appointed to represent in three dependency matters involving her children. Reitz, who did not have an office and saw clients at various locations, first met the client when he attended a meeting at a shelter where she was staying. The client told him she had been a victim of domestic abuse, and he knew she was vulnerable. They began exchanging text messages with erotic content and ultimately engaged in sex. Reitz did not have a romantic or sexual relationship with the client before undertaking the representation. He acknowledged that this conduct violated
RPC 1.7(a)(2), concurrent conflict of interest, and
RPC 1.8(j) which prohibits a lawyer to engage in sexual conduct with a client, including communications of a sexual nature if the lawyer and client did not have a prior consensual relationship.
The second case arose out of a custody matter in which Reitz was appointed as guardian ad litem (GAL) for the children. He engaged in a series of flirtatious and inappropriate text messages with the children’s mother. He was aware that, as GAL, he was in a position to make recommendations that would affect the outcome of the case and even mentioned his role as GAL in messages to the mother. The mother disclosed this conduct to her lawyer who notified Reitz of her concerns. He then moved to withdraw as GAL which the court ordered fifteen days later. Reitz admitted that this conduct violated RPC 1.7(a)(2).
The parties agreed that mitigating factors were present, including Reitz’s acknowledgement of wrongdoing, remorse, and apologies. As an aggravating factor, the Joint Petition noted that he misused a position of trust to take advantage of a vulnerable client and an interested party, both of whom depended on his representation in serious legal matters.
After a review of the caselaw, the parties agreed that the appropriate discipline is a suspension for three years, which will require Reitz to file a Petition for Reinstatement and prove his fitness, should he seek to return to active status. A three-member panel of the Board approved this recommendation, and the three-year suspension was imposed by the Supreme Court in an Order dated July 6, 2026.
Florida Lawyers Suspended After Settling Dead Client’s Cases
A pair of Florida lawyers were
suspended after admitting that they settled two cases after their client had died, signing his name to a settlement agreement and receiving the settlement funds into their trust account.
Lee Sarkin of Boca Raton, Florida and Drew Mark Levitt of Ocean Ridge, Florida
pled guilty to the disciplinary charges. The record showed that they represented frequent litigant David Poschmann in numerous Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) cases. In November 2021, they reached a settlement in a case Poschmann had filed against a condo association. Unable to reach Poschmann, they signed his name to the settlement agreement with an ink signature. The settlement proceeds were paid into Levitt's trust account in accordance with the settlement agreement.
A month later, they learned that Poschmann had died a few days before the settlement was reached. They did not inform the defendants’ counsel or the court of this fact.
Approximately a year and a half later, the defendant’s counsel learned that Poschmann had died before Levitt and Sarkin settled the case and filed a motion to set aside the dismissal and vacate the settlement. The court found that because the settlement was reached after Poschmann’s death, Levitt and Sarkin no longer had authority to act on Poschmann’s behalf, that the settlement was unauthorized, and that their conduct constituted a fraud on the court. The settlement was vacated, Levitt and Sarkin stipulated to a fee award of $11,287.40 in favor of the defendant, and the matter was referred to the grievance committee of the Federal bar. They admitted that this conduct violated Rules Regulating the Florida Bar: 4-1.3 Diligence, 4-3.3(a)(1) Candor Toward the Tribunal, 4-3.4(a) Fairness to Opposing Party and Counsel, and 4-8.4(c) Misconduct. On that committee’s recommendation, the attorneys were suspended from the Federal bar for nine months in addition to other sanctions.
In a second case, the attorneys admitted to an almost identical pattern in litigation against a revocable trust. In that case, Levitt and Sarkin returned the settlement proceeds without intervention of the court.
Based on the same facts, the Supreme Court of Florida
suspended Levitt and Sarkin for a period of three years.
AI Roundup: It’s Everywhere Now
We really don’t want this newsletter to become the
Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice Review, but the stories keep coming.
It seems like every month we are seeing stories about lawyers who were dressed down by courts for filing documents or briefs containing bad information generated by AI resources.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
reprimanded a Florida lawyer for filing briefs that included “fake and hallucinated” artificial intelligence-generated information. This might not be a story these days except that the lawyer,
Anthony Sabatini, a current county commissioner and former member of the Florida House of Representatives, cited a fictitious case supposedly decided by the 11
th Circuit Court itself. The Court noted, “Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence.”
Misuse of AI resources is not limited to busy private practitioners. In the Michigan
immigration case of Izzeddin Ahmed Abdulgahffar Daghra, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan criticized an Assistant U.S. Attorney for citing a nonexistent case evidently generated by AI. The judge wrote, “It should be obvious that any attorney who uses AI must scrupulously review its work product to ensure that the cited cases exist and that the citations accurately and fairly represent the underlying case law.”
It gets worse. In the case of
Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a Mississippi Federal court found that not one, not two, but
four attorneys on both sides
had submitted briefs containing hallucinated cases. Two were out-of-state counsel admitted pro hac vice, and two were local counsel for the respective parties. The court’s level of unhappiness was reflected in the sanctions order. One out-of-state attorney had her pro hac vice admissions revoked, was barred from appearing before the court for two years, fined $2,500, and ordered to take a CLE course on artificial intelligence with an ethics component. The other was revoked, barred from appearing for two years, and fined $3,500. The two local attorneys were disqualified from appearing in the case and fined $1,000 each. Disciplinary referrals all around.
Such stories have made many law firms and lawyers reluctant to invest heavily in AI tools. Alternative legal services provider Axiom
reports that a survey of 528 in-house legal leaders from six countries found that 83% of legal teams cannot determine whether their spending on AI is paying off. However, all the respondents said their legal teams plan to raise their budgets for AI, and 98% said their teams would benefit from outside guidance on AI. Fear of falling behind the curve on new technology motivated many of these firms.
Whatever reservations more experienced practitioners may have, younger attorneys seem to be embracing the technology at a faster rate. A
survey by the NALP Foundation (National Association for Law Placement) found that 48% of 2022 law school graduates use AI tools “frequently” or “occasionally” as either an essential part of their daily work or for specific tasks or projects, and another 30% reported they “rarely” do so. Only 22% reported they “never” use AI tools in their current work.
How can lawyers avoid the risk of citing hallucinated authorities? The
ABA Journal asked several IT-savvy lawyers and received a number of helpful strategies, including:
- Ask it some follow-up questions. Challenge it about the information it provides. It may admit it was wrong.
- Use AI in the middle of a project to see if something was missed along the way.
- Read every case a colleague on the other side has cited and, if they have cited a hallucinated case or an inaccurate quotation, call and ask them to correct the submission. Otherwise, one may be responsible for it as well.
- Change the prompt or use the same prompt more than once to see if the results change.
- Don't use general-purpose chatbots for caselaw research. Use tools grounded in actual legal databases.
But the advice most of the experts give is the same: read the cases. All of them. One’s own and one’s opponent’s. As the court said, “Artificial intelligence . . . is no substitute for actual intelligence.”
Whatever reservations attorneys have about AI technology, it appears that clients view it as a valuable tool in finding attorneys. The
AI Legal Consumer Report 2026, produced by
LLM Listed, found that 96% of 871 Americans who hired a lawyer in the past six months, or were planning to, said they trust AI platforms to recommend a good law firm; 84% said they wouldn’t trust a firm that did not appear in AI results; and 74% would use AI to vet a firm's reputation before hiring.
Beekeeper Sentenced to Six Months for Apian Attack
A Massachusetts court
sentenced a beekeeper to six months in prison for her conviction on charges of releasing her bees to attack deputies who were trying to evict her friend. Rebecca Woods was charged with seven felony counts, including assault with a deadly weapon, after she drove up in a truck with several beehives and opened them up while deputies were attempting to serve eviction papers on her eighty-year-old friend who was undergoing cancer treatments. Several officers were stung and one was hospitalized.
A jury acquitted her of all the felony counts but found her guilty of four misdemeanor counts of assault and two counts of reckless assault.
Woods probably didn’t help herself by claiming she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape.” At trial, though, she admitted she was trying to stop the eviction.
Although her sentence was for six months, she will only serve two weeks as she has been held without bail since being extradited to Massachusetts after fleeing to Tennessee. Her lawyer said that Woods, an advocate for the homeless in addition to her beekeeping avocation, was driven by a desire to protect people from predatory lenders who charged extortionate rates on non-mainstream mortgages. Despite her efforts, her friend was evicted.
In a sad note, Woods asserted that nearly a thousand of her bees lost their lives in her ill-fated rescue mission. Some died of the stings, and many of them were crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her.
