Suspension and disbarment round out the options.
The referee's recommendation merely to suspend Louis Weinstein was met with shock and dismay among Bar officials, who immediately pleaded with the state Supreme Court to raise the punishment to disbarment. In his defense, Weinstein cited a number of cases in which attorneys who were far more successful than he at soliciting clients -- though perhaps not in hospital rooms -- were typically only suspended temporarily. He also wondered why his ill-conceived and badly bungled attempt to solicit Mortilla should be seen as being more heinous than the efforts of those cold and calculating attorneys who, through a network of informants, solicit dozens of cases every year. In essence, he argued, his real crime was that he failed to be more sophisticated in establishing a buffer between himself and the client he was trying to solicit. The high court didn't buy it. On September 27, 1993, 32 months after being caught in Phillip Mortilla's hospital room, the state Supreme Court finally rendered its decision: Louis Weinstein would be disbarred.
Weinstein has fared far better on the criminal side of his case. More than three years after the incident, the criminal charges brought by the Broward State Attorney's Office are still entangled in the courts. Weinstein's defense has been simple and effective. He argues that even though he went into the hospital room fully prepared to sign Mortilla as a client, he never actually did it.
It was a similar defense Weinstein used unsuccessfully during the Bar's grievance committee when his attorney at that time, Nicholas Friedman, argued: "I think to the credit of my client, with all due respect to his stupidity..., he did not commit the underlying offense of soliciting the gentleman because I think basically he recognized that the person was incompetent to sign the documents." And once Weinstein realized this, Friedman said, "the underlying integrity of my client came through."
While Friedman was unsuccessful in getting the Bar to accept the notion of his client's "underlying integrity," Weinstein's criminal attorneys persuaded a Broward circuit court judge to dismiss all criminal charges against him. "In order to be found guilty, he would have had to have actually requested to be hired," explains Weinstein's current attorney, Marc Nurik. None of the witnesses heard Weinstein ask to be hired. The nurse, Judith Overman, for instance, only heard him ask Mortilla if he had been wearing a helmet.
The State Attorney's Office appealed, and the Fourth District Court of Appeals reinstated the charges against Weinstein, but on technical grounds that Nurik believes leave open the door to another dismissal. "This has been a very difficult ordeal for him," Nurik says of his client. "The guy has already been more severely punished by being disbarred than any criminal court is going to do to him.
