Screenshot of Legal Profession Blog.

A lawyer who writes a popular blog about attorney discipline was sued for defamation Tuesday by an attorney featured in a series of critical blog posts.

The lawsuit was filed against Michael Frisch, adjunct professor and ethics counsel at Georgetown University Law Center, who is also the primary author of the Legal Profession Blog, which highlights attorney discipline cases across the country. The plaintiff in the suit brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is attorney John Paul Szymkowicz, who also named Law Professor Blogs LLC, a blogging network owned by Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine University Rick J. Caruso School of Law. Frisch's Legal Profession Blog is a member of Law Professor Blogs.

The complaint alleges that Frisch published a series of blog posts between 2012 and 2018 that "engaged in false, defamatory, public, and vile personal attacks against J.P. Szymkowicz, culminating in their most recent accusations of legal misconduct, 'elder care abuse,' and 'horrific elder abuse.'"

Reached Tuesday, Frisch said he had not been served with the lawsuit and declined to comment. Caron did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday, nor did attorney John B. Williams of Washington, D.C., firm Williams Lopatto, who is representing Szymkowicz.

The allegedly defamatory blog posts focused on a lengthy ethics case that was launched against Szymkowicz and his father, also a lawyer, in the District of Columbia that centered on their role in litigation involving four members of a feuding family and the fate of a revocable trust. One member of the family filed complaints with the District of Columbia Office of Disciplinary Counsel in 2005 and 2007 claiming that the Szymkowicz men had conflicts of interest in the case because they represented both the mother and the son in the proceedings.

Disciplinary Counsel Julia Porter—who the plaintiff claims is friends with Frisch, himself a former assistant bar counsel in the District of Columbia—asserted charges of conflict of interest and dishonesty against the Szymkowiczes. Following hearings in 2009 and 2010, the Hearing Committee of the Board on Professional Responsibility recommended dismissal of all the charges, and the District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility followed that recommendation in 2014.

In 2015, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals dismissed the dishonesty charges against the Szymkowiczes but tasked the Board on Professional Responsibility to reconsider the conflict of interest charges due to the fact that the duo had jointly represented two of the parties, and it was unclear whether they had obtained informed consent to the joint representation.

But the board in 2017 concluded that Porter had never proven that the Szymkowiczes failed to obtain that informed consent and the following year the appeals court dismissed all remaining charges against the lawyer duo.

Throughout the proceedings, Frisch wrote a series of posts critical of the Szymkowiczes' conduct and the Board on Professional Responsibilities' handling of the case. The first post, in 2012, was titled, "The Worst Hearing Committee Report in D.C. History," the complaint notes. The last post ran in 2018 after all charges against the Szymkowiczes were dismissed, and was titled, "District of Columbia Court Absolves Attorneys of Horrific Elder Abuse Conflict."

"I find this shocking, but at least it makes the agenda of this report crystal clear: protect the profession, trash the victim of misconduct (and discourage other victims from coming forward), make future Bar Counsel prosecutions virtually impossible and use the whole thing as a marketing tool," Frisch wrote.

The complaint alleges that Frisch falsely accused the plaintiff of elder abuse, among other things.

"Defendants continued to falsely accuse the Szymkowiczes of misconduct and elder abuse despite their knowledge that the disciplinary charges had been rejected by every tribunal to consider them," it reads.

Szymkowicz had brought claims of defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional affliction of emotional distress.