ATTORNEY disciplinary proceeding. Attorney's license revoked.

¶1 PER CURIAM. Attorney Adam Walsh has filed a petition for the consensual revocation of his license to practice law in Wisconsin pursuant to Supreme Court Rule (SCR) 22.19. Attorney Walsh's petition states that he cannot successfully defend against the allegations of professional misconduct arising out of two Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR) investigations concerning his conduct. An OLR summary of those investigations and of the potential allegations of professional misconduct is attached to Attorney Walsh's petition.

¶2 Attorney Walsh was admitted to the practice of law in Wisconsin in January 2008. He most recently practiced in Madison under the name Affordable Legal Services of Wisconsin. Attorney Walsh sold the law firm to another attorney effective January 1, 2015. He continued to work at the firm, however, until November 25, 2015.

¶3 Attorney Walsh has been the subject of professional discipline on one prior occasion. In 2015 he consented to the imposition of a private reprimand pursuant to SCR 22.09 for improperly using his client trust account credit card on three separate occasions to disburse trust account funds prior to the deposit and availability of those funds for the respective clients and for failing to maintain and to produce required trust account records. Private Reprimand 2015-1 (electronic copy available at

https://compendium.wicourts.gov/app/raw/00 2757.html).

¶4 Attorney Walsh filed a petition for the voluntary resignation of his license to practice law in this state in June 2016. Because the OLR's response to that petition indicated that it was conducting an investigation regarding Attorney Walsh, his voluntary resignation petition has been held in abeyance. In light of his current petition, his petition for voluntary resignation is being dismissed pursuant to a separate order being issued simultaneously with this opinion.

¶5 The OLR summary attached to Attorney Walsh's petition for consensual revocation sets forth two main areas of investigation into potential ethical violations.

¶6 The first area involves Attorney Walsh's multiple instances of insufficient balances in his client trust account. Attorney Walsh maintained a client trust account at JP Morgan Chase Bank in Madison from November 19, 2010, until October 14, 2015. At the time he closed the account, Attorney Walsh withdrew for himself the remaining balance of $868.26. A check Attorney Walsh had issued against the trust account, however, was subsequently presented for payment on November 3, 2015, and was returned for insufficient funds. Attorney Walsh claims that he reimbursed the recipient of the trust account check via other means.

¶7 Although the OLR's investigation was hampered by Attorney Walsh's refusal or inability to provide records for his trust account, the available information shows that on multiple occasions, the trust account contained substantially less money than it should have in 2014 and 2015. For example, bank records show that the balance in the trust account was $469,349.55 on May 31, 2014. At that time, the trust account should have contained at least $78,351.86 in funds belonging to two clients, J.M.G. and M.J.E. Subtracting that amount from the balance would leave a remaining balance of $390,997.69. This amount, however, was more than $50,000 less than Attorney Walsh had previously admitted in a letter he should have been holding for another client, a substantial trust. Indeed, that amount would have been more than $78,000 less than the amount identified in the March 28, 2014 annual report of the trust. Moreover, the limited records the OLR was able to obtain indicate that Attorney Walsh deposited over $589,000 into his trust account on behalf of the trust, but those records also show total disbursements of only approximately $530,000 to proper recipients of the trust's funds. Because the OLR has not been able to obtain complete records, it cannot tell whether there were other disbursements to proper recipients for which records are not available or whether Attorney Walsh converted some or all of the remaining trust's funds to his own use.

¶8 Similar possible shortcomings in disbursements of other client funds appear in connection with at least three other clients. The amounts that do not appear to have been disbursed to the clients or to other proper recipients, however, are substantially smaller than was the case with the trust's money. What is clear is that in at least one case, the balance of Attorney Walsh's client trust account dipped more than $30,000 below the amount that should have been held in trust for just one client. Thus, that amount of client funds had to have been converted to the use of other clients or to Attorney Walsh's personal use.

¶9 Indeed, Attorney Walsh admitted to the OLR that starting at least as far back as 2011 he had placed substantial sums of his own money into the trust account and had not kept track of those funds. Given the fact that on multiple occasions the balance in his trust account was substantially less than the amounts that were owed to clients, one can only conclude that Attorney Walsh needed to deposit his own funds into the account at times to avoid overdrafts and to repay amounts he had previously converted to his own use.