ATTORNEY Shelli Neal has requested the Superior Court to dismiss the NMI Bar Association’s complaint for disciplinary action against her.
Neal’s lawyer, Michael Dotts, said, “The Disciplinary Committee investigated the matter and voted to refer it for prosecution. However, the disciplinary committee lacked the capacity to do so.”
“The Bar Disciplinary Committee members must be elected by a majority vote of active members of the Bar Association,” he added.
According to Dotts, the active members of the bar numbered 166 in 2022, and 154 in 2023.
“This means that the two positions open in 2022 needed 84 votes each and the three positions open in 2023 need 78 votes each from the active members to fill them. No member received more than 13 votes in 2022 or 17 votes in 2023. No member elected to the Disciplinary Committee in either of these two years was properly seated on the Committee,” Dotts said.
In its complaint, the Bar Association asks the court to discipline Neal, and to order her to provide her former client, Qihao “Henry” Liang, with any and all accounting applicable to their attorney-client relationship, and pay all funds owed to Liang derived from the rental monies received by Neal on his behalf.
The bar appointed Jose Mafnas Jr. as prosecuting attorney.
Mafnas said Neal should serve a 90-day interim suspension, “subject to extensions, until the matter is adjudicated, and discipline is administered.”
Mafnas also wants the court to order Neal to promptly pay all reasonable costs associated with the investigation and prosecution of the disciplinary matter to the judiciary and/or the NMI Bar.
He said Neal should be “held liable for all other damages, legal or equitable, that the Commonwealth Superior Court and/or the Commonwealth Supreme Court, deem appropriate.”
Background
The complaint accused Neal of misconduct and lack of due diligence in her representation of Liang in a civil action.
A former CNMI chief prosecutor, Neal represented Liang in 2017 in Superior Court Civil Action 17-0142.
The complaint stated that Liang also appointed her to receive on his behalf a $500 monthly rental payment for a property he owned. He likewise retained Neal to conduct a real estate lease transaction for him sometime in 2017 involving a piece of property in Dandan worth $183,000.
On Dec. 6, 2022, Liang filed a complaint with the CNMI Bar Association’s Disciplinary Committee.
“Notwithstanding receiving notice from the NMI Disciplinary Committee regarding Mr. Liang’s complaints against her, Ms. Neal did not make any effort to cure the obvious lack of communication to Mr. Liang regarding his real estate tax nor did she make any effort to provide him with an accounting as he had requested from her multiple times,” the complaint stated.
In the motion to dismiss the complaint, Dotts said, “The review of a complaint by a properly constituted Disciplinary Committee is part of the due process an attorney is entitled to.”
“The Committee is analogous to a Grand Jury,” he added. “If a Grand Jury is not properly seated, any indictment it issues is invalid. Likewise, the referral issued by the improperly seated CNMI Disciplinary Committee against Neal was invalid. Because the referral was invalid this court lacks subject matter jurisdiction and this case must be dismissed.”
In addition, Dotts said his client “was not provided adequate time by the Disciplinary Committee to respond to the allegations and this was a separate violation of the Rules of Attorney Discipline and Procedure that also justifies dismissal.”
