Elizabeth City attornrey suspended

Attorney: William H. Morgan Jr.

Location: Elizabeth City

Bar membership: Member since 1986

Disciplinary action: Suspended from the practice of law for four years on Jan. 26. The suspension is stayed for four years so long as Morgan complies with certain conditions.

Background: Morgan maintained an attorney trust account. From late 2006 to March 2015, Morgan delegated trust accounting tasks to a non-lawyer assistant but didn’t substantively supervise the assistant’s activities or independently review trust account reconciliations, bank statements, checks, or records. As of December 2014, Morgan had failed to maintain a list of client balances and didn’t know to which clients and in which amounts the balance of funds in his trust account belonged, and had disbursed more funds for clients from his trust account than he had in the trust for those clients, and didn’t deposit funds to cure these deficits until March 2019, when his trust account was the subject of a random audit by the state bar. The audit found that Morgan had failed to conduct quarterly reconciliations, failed to identify the clients whose funds in the trust account were being disbursed, and failed to identify the source of funds on deposit slips, and that the employee responsible for conducting monthly reconciliations and signing trust account checks hadn’t taken the required trust account management training.

Previous discipline: None

All information contained in the Bar Discipline Roundup is compiled and edited by Lawyers Weekly editor-in-chief David Donovan. He can be reached at [email protected].