In THE MATTER OF DEIRDRE MARIA STEPHENS (Two Cases)

Deirdre Maria Stephens, a Georgia lawyer since 1997, faced two disciplinary matters. In one, her trust account briefly overdrew because a client's payment was late. In the more serious matter, she told a trial court in 2015 that $80,000 from a business sale remained safely in her trust account, when in fact she had already paid most of it out to her client. She repeated this false claim in later court filings and, after the court found her in contempt and ordered her to pay the plaintiffs, she used her own money to cover the judgment while still misleading the court and the State Bar about what had happened. A Special Master recommended disbarment, but the State Disciplinary Review Board recommended a lighter six-month suspension and public reprimand. The Supreme Court of Georgia reviewed both recommendations and sided with the Special Master, concluding that Stephens's years of dishonesty to the court warranted the harshest sanction: disbarment.

The court held that an attorney who knowingly and repeatedly made false statements to a trial court about the location of client funds, and continued the deception in later court filings and to the State Bar, must be disbarred, even though restitution was eventually made and no client suffered permanent financial loss.

The decision reinforces that Georgia lawyers who knowingly lie to courts about client funds, even if they eventually make restitution under threat of contempt, risk losing their license entirely. It signals to attorneys and the public that dishonesty to a tribunal is treated more seriously than mishandling trust accounts alone.

Disbarred

1. The court applied the ABA Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions, a framework courts use to match punishment to the duty violated, the lawyer's mental state, and the harm caused, and found that intentionally deceiving a court about client funds presumptively calls for disbarment.
2. The court agreed with the Special Master, who personally heard Stephens testify, that her false statements to the trial court over four years were not an isolated act but a pattern of similar dishonest conduct, rejecting the Review Board's narrower view that only 'different behaviors' count as a pattern.
3. The court found that Stephens's eventual payment of the $80,000 could not count as a mitigating factor because she only paid after being threatened with contempt, and forced or compelled restitution is not treated as mitigating under the ABA Standards.
4. The court gave deference to the Special Master's in-person assessment of Stephens's credibility and motive, concluding her conduct was at least partly driven by a selfish desire to hide her mishandling of the funds rather than solely to protect her client.
5. Weighing the severity and duration of the deception against precedent involving attorneys who made repeated false statements to courts, the court concluded that disbarment, rather than suspension, was the only sanction proportionate to the misconduct.

• attorney disbarment
• State Bar of Georgia
• trust account violations
• false statements to court
• legal ethics