Mid-size Nevada based firm. Billable hours are way up. Receipts are way up. The distribution pot looks like it will be almost double last year (our previous best year).

1:22–that's the disconnect with these maters, and people need to better advise these victims on account that due to the extreme emotions involved it is understandable that some victims will not exercise much common sense when offering input on such issues.

You can't have both the pound of flesh(letting the person rot in prison) while still expecting them to pay back tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, that said, a lot of these attorneys, even when not incarcerated, do little or nothing in terms of paying meaningful restitution, on account that they can no longer practice as attorneys yet owe astronomical amounts in terms of restitution.

But once in a while, if you restore these people to the practice of law, they are able to do a really good job at addressing the restitution. Doug Crawford comes to mind.He paid off all the restitution a long time ago. I dare say that never could have occurred if he was not permitted to return to practice. No one offers disbarred attorneys six figure administrative or executive positons.

I'm not in the habit of taking up for the NSC, but in my opinion, based on the cases I am aware of, they seem to do a much better job than the State Bar, in recognizing the reality that the only hope to get some of these victims even partially compensated is to give some of these attorneys a realistic crack at returning to practice. Indicating you can apply for readmission after you pay half a million in restitution is absurd.

I understand that some of these people don't deserve to ever return to practice, while others, even if they return, will not put a meaningful dent in restitution. But occasionally there is a real success story when the system takes a leap of faith and lets some of these people return to practice, usually under some real strict conditions.

When the State Bar over does things with this soap box moralizing about how someone betrayed the dignity and decorum of deserving the esteemed title "attorney", and that disbarring this person protects certain members of the public from future potential exploitation, they are ignoring those who are by far the most immediate and important people who need to be protected–real tangible clients who lost real money. Those people must be priority #1, but they realistically can never be even partially compensated unless the attorney who wronged them has a potential shot at straightening out, resuming practice, and eventually start paying restitution.

Again, I acknowledge that many(and perhaps most) of these suspended attorneys should never be restored to practice, and that if they were, they would simply resume their old ways. But, again, there are those occasional success stories, and they only occur when the attorney in question can resume practice.