From The Ethics Reporter story titled Thirty-Two Days, Two Sentences: New York’s Grievance Committee Tosses the Ethics Complaint Against E. Jean Carroll’s Lawyer:
It took the National Legal and Policy Center months to research and draft its 15-page ethics complaint against Roberta Kaplan, the Manhattan litigator who won E. Jean Carroll two headline-making verdicts against President Donald Trump. It took New York’s attorney discipline system 32 days to make the complaint disappear — with a dismissal that, according to the complainant, devoted exactly two sentences to the substance.
On August 3, Jorge Dopico, chief attorney of the Attorney Grievance Committee of the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, sent NLPC a letter rejecting the complaint it had filed on July 2. No investigation preceded the rejection, NLPC says. The matter never went before the full committee. A single screening attorney reviewed it and closed the file.
Whatever one thinks of the underlying allegations — and there are serious arguments on both sides — the episode is a case study in the way attorney discipline actually works in New York: quietly, quickly, and with almost no obligation to explain itself.
***
Set aside the politics — NLPC is a conservative watchdog, Kaplan is a celebrated progressive litigator, and each side will read this outcome through its preferred lens. The process question remains, and it is not a partisan one.
***
The complaint’s dismissal also fits a broader national pattern this publication has documented repeatedly: bar discipline is swift and severe for small-firm practitioners who miss escrow deadlines, and strikingly hesitant when the respondent is powerful, connected, or politically sympathetic to regulators. The merits of any single complaint aside, a screening process that can kill a 15-page complaint in two sentences — without ever reaching the full committee — is a process built for discretion, not accountability.
***
(NLPC Counsel Paul) Kamenar has announced that NLPC will appeal the rejection. The stakes extend beyond one lawyer. Third-party litigation funding is a multibillion-dollar industry that increasingly shapes high-profile American litigation, and the profession’s rules on disclosure, client consent, and fee arrangements were not written with billionaire-backed political causes in mind. Whether a lawyer can sit on knowledge of false deposition testimony about that funding for six months without professional consequence is a question the bar should want to answer in public — whatever the answer turns out to be.
For now, New York’s answer is two sentences long.
***
Click here for the whole article on TheEthicsReporter.com.
(editor’s note— NLPC’s appeal was filed on September 2, 2026.)
Photo by David Warren /Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images)
