Minnesota Lawyer
The Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility is seeking the suspension of Marc G. Kurzman, a Minneapolis attorney. Kurzman has 20 days to respond to the allegations made in the disciplinary petition.
The petition details two client matters in which Kurzman is accused of violating rules of professional conduct. In the first, a man retained Kurzman to represent him in his effort to increase parenting time with his daughter. According to the petition, the man wanted to remove the court-appointed psychologist, and Kurzman remarked that he thought the psychologist had been accused of sexually abusing children thirty years ago. During a deposition, Kurzman is alleged to have questioned the psychologist on the matter, despite having done no investigating to determine if his recollection of an accusation was true. After the father terminated Kurzman, Kurzman is accused of failing to provide the father’s complete case files until the father complained.
In a second client matter, Kurzman was retained in a custody and visitation dispute. Kurzman was accused of submitting records a month late to the court and failing to request an extension. After the client terminated Kurzman in that case, she requested her files and received incomplete records. When she requested the rest of her case file, she alleged, she was shipped court pleadings and other materials belonging to other clients of Kurzman.
Kurzman, who was admitted to practice law in Minnesota in 1972, has eight previous instances of discipline. He received multiple admonitions in 1994, 1996, 2001 and 2003 for violating several different rules of professional conduct. The accusations ranged from recording a telephone conversation without the other party’s knowledge or consent to failing to place client funds in his trust account to telling a court he was a pharmacist when he wasn’t. He was placed on probation in 2007 for offering illegally obtained evidence to the court, offering a motion that results in a sanction and billing the client for the amount of that sanction. He was also reprimanded and placed on probation in 2010 after being accused of transferring money from a trust account, failing to maintain trust account books accurately and commingling personal and client funds in his trust account.
