A onetime Dorsey & Whitney employment and immigration lawyer was disbarred in Washington after the state's highest court found she improperly maintained outside clients without alerting the firm or reporting the legal fees she collected from “off-the-books” work.

The Supreme Court of the State of Washington ruled on April 12 that Carllene Placide, a former nonequity partner at Dorsey who worked at the firm from 2006 to 2011, should be disbarred for effectively stealing from and trying to mislead the firm. During her time at Dorsey, the court wrote, Placide collected some $56,700 in fees from outside clients. The court also criticized her for mishandling flat fees that individual clients had paid to her upfront, which were supposed to be placed in an interest-bearing attorney trust account.

Placide did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment that was sent Tuesday to an address listed for her in the Washington state bar directory.

At the time she started at Dorsey, Placide was earning a base salary of $225,000 as a nonequity partner in the firm's Seattle office, according to the court. She was also subject to a policy requiring her to report any outside clients or fees to Dorsey. After conducting an internal investigation, Dorsey discovered the outside clients, and when representatives of the firm confronted Placide about their findings, she denied completing any outside work.

“Dorsey had a firm policy stating that all compensation received by Dorsey partners, associates, or other attorneys was property of the firm,” the Washington high court wrote. “For several years prior to 2011 and while a partner at Dorsey, she represented individual immigration clients who hired her personally (outside clients) and who paid her directly. She failed to disclose the existence of these clients to Dorsey.”

The court also found that, in 2011, Placide entered discussions with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart. Dorsey terminated her employment in November 2011, after which Placide went to work as an Ogletree Deakins shareholder—she had told the new firm that Dorsey let her go because it found that she was looking to move her practice and neglected to mention the internal investigation and outside client issues, the Washington court wrote.

Although Ogletree Deakins didn't have a written policy about outside work, it expected shareholders to work exclusively for the firm's clients. The high court wrote that, while Placide knew about those expectations, she continued to represent individual clients without telling Ogletree Deakins, collecting some $10,000 in fees while at the law firm. In November 2012, Ogletree learned from Dorsey that it had filed an ethics complaint against Placide in light of her outside client work while at Dorsey.

“When Ogletree's general counsel contacted Placide to discuss the Dorsey ethics complaint, Placide repeatedly lied, stating that Dorsey had approved her representation of outside clients and that Dorsey terminated her because it became aware of the discussions with Ogletree regarding potential employment,” the Washington high court wrote.

In light of the revelations, Ogletree Deakins and Placide entered into a January 2013 separation agreement in which she pledged to pay the firm any fees she had received from outside clients. Those payments weren't made as of the beginning of the disciplinary procedure against Placide, according to the April 12 ruling.