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In re Disciplinary Proceedings Against Konnor3/25/2005
e's report; consequently the facts are not now in dispute. Briefly summarized, the pertinent facts with respect to each of the eight counts are these:
COUNT ONE
. Attorney Chris K. Konnor was retained to handle the B.B. estate in March of 1997. After preliminary proceedings to determine heirs, Konnor was appointed as personal representative by the Milwaukee Deputy Register in Probate on October 6, 1997. The next day, Konnor opened a noninterest-bearing estate checking account for which, as the personal representative, Konnor had check writing authority. Konnor, however, did not arrange with the bank to have the cancelled checks returned to him, nor did he regularly receive from the bank the cancelled checks for the estate until January 2002, after one of the beneficiaries had complained to OLR about Konnor's handling of the estate. That course of conduct, from 1997 to 2002, where Konnor failed to maintain complete records of the account he held in trust, led to Count One of the OLR complaint which alleged that Konnor had violated SCR 20:1.15(a) and (e).
COUNT TWO
. At the time of her death, B.B. owned a rooming house with multiple rental units. After her death, one or more of her brothers moved into the rooming house and began collecting rent from the other tenants; however, these rental payments were not forwarded to Konnor for deposit in the estate's account. Konnor sent letters to the 12 tenants in the rooming house requesting that their rent be forwarded directly to him as the estate's personal representative. Initially, he received payment from several of the tenants, but after October 6, 1997, Konnor received rent payments from only one of the tenants; the rental payments from the other tenants continued to be received by two of B.B.'s brothers.
. In a letter sent to a tax accountant in February 2000, Konnor stated that he believed the decedent's two brothers had "stole all the rents after the decedent died." Despite this, Konnor did not inform the probate court about any difficulty in collecting the rents, nor did he notify the police or take any steps to try to evict the tenants from whom he was not receiving rent.
. This course of misconduct led to Count Two of the OLR complaint which alleged that instead of collecting rent from all of the tenants, including B.B.'s brothers, Konnor had allowed the brothers to misappropriate the rent from the estate without taking any action to protect the estate assets. By doing nothing to prevent these types of estate misappropriations, it was alleged that Konnor had failed to act with reasonable diligence and promptness, in violation of SCR 20:1.3.
COUNTS THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE
. In July 1998 Konnor deposited several money orders he had received from the one tenant who had been making the rental payments directly to him. The dated money orders contained notations that they represented that tenant's rent for December 1997 and for January, February, March, April, June, and July of 1998. In January 1999 Konnor deposited another money order from that tenant dated August 3, 1998; again in February 2000, Konnor deposited another money order from that same tenant dated May 1, 1998. In his testimony before the referee, Konnor offered no explanation for these delayed deposits other than stating that he did not routinely travel to the area where the bank was located.
. The testimony before the referee also established that in October 1997 Konnor sent a letter to the heirs of the estate advising them that he was in the process of preparing the inventory; however, in April 1998 the inventory had yet to be filed and the probate court ordered Konnor to file it by
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