Every system of review has a top floor — a last door, beyond which there is no further appeal. In New York’s courts, that door is marked Court of Appeals. In the federal system, it says Supreme Court of the United States. In New York’s attorney discipline system, for the person who filed the complaint, the last door turns out to be the first one: the same committee whose decision he is trying to challenge.
Alex Lamartina has spent the better part of a year learning this. Lamartina, a New York man whose correspondence with disciplinary authorities has been reviewed by The Ethics Reporter — and who has asked, repeatedly and in writing, that his name be used — filed a grievance with the Ninth Judicial District Grievance Committee against his former attorney. His complaint, as he describes it, was not about money. He alleged that the lawyer disclosed his confidential medical information to a third party without authorization, in what he contends was a violation of Rule 1.6 of the Rules of Professional Conduct; that the lawyer accepted a retainer to file a specific action and then declined to file it; and that the lawyer refused to return his files.
The committee dismissed the complaint. According to Lamartina, the disposition characterized the matter as a “billing issue” — a fee dispute, the category of grievance that committees routinely decline to pursue and redirect to fee-arbitration programs. The characterization is not a small thing. New York maintains an entire parallel apparatus for fee disputes — the Part 137 fee-arbitration program — and a complaint routed there is a complaint the discipline system has decided is about money rather than conduct. A confidentiality breach is not a billing issue. A retainer accepted for work never performed may be both. The power to choose the label is, functionally, the power to choose the forum, and the label is applied by the committee, unreviewably, at intake. The attorney in question has never been found to have committed misconduct, and the committee’s dismissal means, formally, that the disciplinary system found nothing to pursue. Grievance files are confidential under New York law — Judiciary Law § 90(10) seals them unless and until public discipline results — and the committee’s side of the story, its actual reasoning, whatever investigation it conducted, is something neither Lamartina nor this publication can see. That confidentiality, it should be said, protects complainants and accused attorneys alike, and there may be more to the committee’s reasoning than its correspondence reveals.
What can be seen, in the correspondence Lamartina has preserved, is what happened when he tried to get someone else to look.
The Loop
Believing the Ninth District had mischaracterized ethics allegations as a fee dispute, Lamartina sought review from the grievance committees of the First Judicial Department, in Manhattan, and the Second Judicial Department, in Brooklyn and Queens. His theory was straightforward: he was now complaining, in part, about the Ninth District committee itself, and a body cannot impartially review a challenge to its own conduct.
Both committees, according to the correspondence, declined to review the matter — not on the merits, but on jurisdiction. The attorney’s office sits in Westchester County. Westchester belongs to the Ninth Judicial District. The complaint was accordingly referred back to the Ninth District Grievance Committee: the same body whose decision, and whose conduct, Lamartina was attempting to place before an independent reviewer.
No rule was bent in either referral; jurisdiction genuinely lies where the rules put it. That is the point — the loop is not a malfunction but the design functioning exactly as written. In August, the loop closed. The committee advised Lamartina by letter that his remedies before it were exhausted and directed that he cease contacting the committee’s chair. He has said he will comply. There is nowhere left for the complaint to go.
A System Without an Appellate Floor
None of this required anyone to break a rule. That is what makes it worth writing about.
New York’s attorney discipline system is administered by the four departments of the Appellate Division, each of which appoints grievance committees for the judicial districts within its territory. Since 2016, the system has operated under a single set of statewide procedural rules — 22 NYCRR Part 1240 — adopted after a commission convened by then-Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman documented, in its 2015 report, how inconsistently the four departments had been handling identical conduct. The uniform rules were a genuine reform. Section 1240.7 spells out what a committee may do with a complaint: dismiss it by letter to complainant and respondent; refer it to another forum, such as fee arbitration; issue a private Letter of Advisement or an admonition; or seek the Appellate Division’s leave to bring formal charges. The rules even guarantee complainants something they never had before: a brief written description of the basis of any disposition.
Read Part 1240 end to end, however, and an asymmetry emerges. A respondent attorney who receives a Letter of Advisement may, within thirty days, file a written request for reconsideration with the committee’s chair; an attorney facing admonition is entitled to advance notice and an opportunity to appear and seek reconsideration before it issues. The complainant’s procedural rights end with the descriptive letter. The uniform rules provide no appeal from a dismissal — not to another committee, not to the Appellate Division that appointed the committee, not to anyone. Individual departments have grafted on informal practices; the Third Department, for instance, describes a process by which a complainant may ask, within thirty days, for reconsideration of a staff attorney’s decision not to investigate, and the First Department’s committee entertains written reconsideration requests, as the National Legal and Policy Center’s recent filing in a high-profile matter demonstrates. But reconsideration is review by the same desk. Venue is fixed by the attorney’s office address, and requests for genuinely independent review are returned, as Lamartina’s were, to the very committee they complain of.
The omission is not an oversight of American discipline generally; it is a New York choice. The American Bar Association’s own Model Rules for Lawyer Disciplinary Enforcement — the template the ABA urges on every state — build complainant review directly into the screening stage: under Model Rule 11, when disciplinary counsel dismisses a complaint, the dismissal “shall be reviewed by the chair upon the complainant’s request for review.” The model system’s designers understood the point precisely: the earliest, least visible decision in the pipeline — the intake dismissal, made by staff, on paper, without investigation — is the decision most in need of a second pair of eyes, because it is the one no court, no hearing panel, and no published opinion will ever touch. Jurisdictions that adopted the ABA architecture wholesale, such as Louisiana with its Rule XIX, carried the review provision with it. New York, whose discipline system predates the model rules and answers to four separate Appellate Division departments, never did.
Contrast what happens across the Hudson. In New Jersey, a grievant whose complaint is dismissed by a District Ethics Committee has a right, written into the court rules — Rule 1:20-15(e) — to appeal that dismissal to the statewide Disciplinary Review Board within twenty-one days. The notice of dismissal must inform the grievant of that right. The DRB is a separate, standing body appointed by the state Supreme Court; it reviews the file, and it can reinstate and remand a complaint the local committee buried. New Jersey’s system is not paradise — the DRB affirms most dismissals, as any honest appellate body affirms most decisions below — but the architecture embodies a principle New York’s omits: the body that made the decision is not the last word on whether the decision was sound. Judicial decisions can be appealed. Administrative agency determinations face Article 78 review. FOIL denials go to the Committee on Open Government and then to court. The dismissal of an attorney grievance in New York — a decision made by an arm of the court system, exercising public regulatory power — answers to no one but its author.
The Numbers Nobody Audits
The scale of the unreviewed discretion is not small. The ABA’s McKay Commission — whose 1992 report, Lawyer Regulation for a New Century, remains the foundational modern study of American attorney discipline — observed that disciplinary agencies nationwide “dismiss tens of thousands of complaints annually,” and built its reform agenda around the insight that public confidence depends on what happens to the complaints that go nowhere, not just the ones that end in disbarment. The First Department’s Attorney Grievance Committee, in its own recent annual report, describes its intake procedure in disarmingly frank terms: a paralegal sends the complaint to the respondent for an answer, may forward the answer to the complainant for a reply, and the file proceeds from there — when it proceeds at all. The overwhelming majority of complaints, in New York as everywhere, are closed at or near intake. Most of those closures are surely correct; disciplinary dockets are full of grievances from litigants disappointed by outcomes rather than injured by ethics violations. But “surely correct” is an inference, not a finding, and it is an inference no external reviewer is ever positioned to test, because in New York no external reviewer exists.
When outsiders have tried to test it, the results have been instructive. In 2021, the nonprofit Civil Rights Corps and a group of law professors filed twenty-one grievance complaints with a Second Department committee against New York prosecutors, documenting alleged misconduct case by case, and asked to be told what became of them. The committee’s response was to remove them as complainants and continue whatever inquiry existed in its own name — a maneuver that stripped the filers of even the minimal notification rights a complainant holds. They were told nothing. They sued the system itself, naming the Second Department’s presiding justice, and in July 2024, in Civil Rights Corps v. LaSalle, a federal judge in Manhattan — Victor Marrero — held that the public has a presumptive First Amendment right of access to know how the grievance system disposed of the complaints, noting that the status of all twenty-one remained unknown and that none had resulted in public discipline. The ruling did not create an appeal right; it created a crack of daylight, and it took three years of federal litigation by an institutional plaintiff to achieve. An individual complainant — a Lamartina — has no comparable leverage. He has a stamp, a file of correspondence, and the committee’s standing invitation to stop writing.
The View From Inside the Loop
What the structure does to complainants is easy to document; Lamartina’s file documents it. His correspondence shows a man cycling through every register available to a citizen — the formal grievance, the request for transfer, the appeal to a second and then a third committee, the letter to the press — each answered, when answered at all, with the same jurisdictional syllogism. Somewhere in the file the tone shifts, as it always does in these archives, from procedural to existential: if the committee’s characterization was wrong, he asks again and again, who is empowered to say so? No one has ever answered him, because under the current rules the true answer is: no one.
It is fair to note what the system would say in its own defense here, if it spoke. Grievance committees process thousands of complaints a year, a great many from litigants disappointed in outcomes rather than injured by ethics violations, and “billing issue” is often a fair reading of a tangled file. Committee members — volunteer lawyers and lay members — do unglamorous, necessary work. Complainants are not parties; discipline exists to protect the public, not to give aggrieved clients a second lawsuit, and the courts have consistently held that a complainant has no personal right to have a lawyer disciplined. An appeal right, the argument runs, would bury committees in relitigated fee disputes. The confidentiality that frustrates complainants also protects attorneys from the reputational wreckage of unfounded accusations — a protection this publication takes seriously. All true. But every one of those arguments was equally available against appellate review of anything, and the legal system long ago decided that unreviewable discretion is dangerous precisely because most exercises of it are sound — the unsound ones being indistinguishable, from the outside, without review. New Jersey’s experience is the empirical answer to the floodgates objection: the appeal right exists, the twenty-one-day clock runs, the DRB processes the appeals, and the discipline system has not drowned.
What an Exit Would Look Like
The fix does not require dismantling anything. The seed of it already exists in New York’s own structure: the Appellate Division departments supervise their committees and could, by rule, provide two things. First, a New Jersey–style right to seek review of a dismissal by a body other than the dismissing committee — a rotating panel drawn from other districts, or a small statewide review office. Second, and more modestly still, a transfer mechanism: a rule providing that where a complaint alleges a conflict of interest within a committee, or where the complaint concerns the committee’s own handling of a prior matter, venue moves to a committee in another district. The Lippman commission proved in 2016 that statewide procedural reform of this system is achievable when the court system wants it; Part 1240 exists because the four departments agreed to bind themselves to common rules. A complainant-review provision would be a paragraph in that same Part. No new agency, no new budget line.
What stands in the way is not administrability but habit — the profession’s deep, unexamined comfort with regulating itself on terms no other regulated industry would be permitted to write. Whether Lamartina’s underlying allegations have merit, no independent body will ever say; that is the point. His complaint may have deserved exactly the dismissal it received. But a system that cannot demonstrate the difference between a sound dismissal and a self-protective one, because it has arranged never to be asked, should not be surprised when complainants — and their letters, and their documents — end up in the press instead.
There is one more reason the reform matters beyond the complainants themselves, and it is the committees’ own interest. This publication has reported through the spring and summer on the Ninth District committee — on questions about the experience of its senior staff, on the culture former insiders describe, on complaints referred elsewhere for want of anyone empowered to hear them. Some of that reporting the committee would surely dispute, if it were free to speak. That is exactly the problem: an institution that operates in secrecy, answers to no reviewing body, and communicates with the public through form letters has no way to defend itself except by pointing to a structure that forbids anyone from checking its work. Independent review is not only how bad dismissals get caught. It is how good ones get believed.
The mail still runs both ways. It is the review that only runs in a circle.