The lawyer could chit chat with strangers and recite poetry—which in his younger days, he composed—and was able to dress himself appropriately and prepare meals. But his bedroom was in “complete disarray,” Yufik said. There was uneaten food accumulating, and dirty laundry strewn about. It smelled of urine.

Although the lawyer could explain basic legal concepts and understood things like his obligation to pay taxes and the importance of health insurance, he was unsure of where his money was held, how much income he was earning, or whether his bills were being paid. The cognitive decline rendered him an easy target, Yufik said.

Routines
Robert Fritzshall would put on a suit every day and take the train to downtown Chicago like he had for years.

He was a creature of habit, lunching at the same restaurants over and over. He would regale McLean, his new associate, with old stories and introduce her to acquaintances around town.

Part of the self-denial common to lawyers in the early stages of dementia has to do with how closely their identities are hewed to their careers and professional status. “It’s where they have found success, it’s where their friends are, it’s where they are comfortable,” Basner said.

One’s identity as a lawyer is “so intertwined with their sense of self,” Vincent said, they will cling to their professional identities “until their dying breath.”

Fritzshall had been a respected member of the Chicago area’s legal community—the prosecuting attorney for the Village of Skokie for 13 years, an arbitrator for 12 years, and president for a time of the North Suburban Bar Association. He also served on Skokie’s Village Board of Trustees, Planning Commission, and the theater board for the Performing Arts Center.

But that had all been before McLean met Fritzshall.

Sideways
Personal injury and workers’ compensation cases were the bread and butter of Fritzshall’s practice when McLean joined in July 2010. She was unfamiliar with those areas of law, but didn’t have to study his files for very long to realize something was wrong.

He was missing irretrievable deadlines and failing to tell clients about significant developments. He didn’t know several cases had been dismissed for failure to prosecute.

In one instance, after he accepted a settlement and opposing counsel filed an affidavit indicating that the parties had reached agreement, Fritzshall denied it.

McLean said she found opposing counsel were often frustrated and seemed to think he was playing games with them.

Before long, she discovered that about half a dozen attorneys had preceded her at Fritzshall & Associates and quickly left, some within weeks.

When she raised her concerns, Fritzshall was aloof.

McLean reached out to the Illinois Lawyers’ Assistance Program. Although there were plenty of resources and protocols for lawyers struggling with substance abuse or mental health disorders, she found the state bar at the time seemed to lack any systematic approach for dealing with Alzheimer’s or age-related dementia.

“It would have been easier if he had been a drug addict,” she said.

Ethical Responsibilities
A lawyer’s duty to report or otherwise intervene when another lawyer is impaired varies by state. At least a dozen states have ethics opinions on the topic, applicable whether the impairment is due to substance abuse, mental health issues, or age-related decline, and the American Bar Association has issued its own guidance. Case law may also come into play, depending on the jurisdiction.

The ABA’s Model Rules provide at least a rough proxy for most jurisdictions.

Among other things, rules may require lawyers to report misconduct that calls fitness or truthworthiness into question. They also demand that supervising attorneys take reasonable steps to ensure subordinate attorneys comply with ethical rules, while prohibiting blind reliance on a supervising attorney’s direction.

Most states have adopted some version of the relevant rules. But there are notable exceptions. California, for example, has rejected the mandatory misconduct reporting requirement, which the state’s bar journal once referred to as the “snitch” rule.

Even if not required, larger law firms often have protocols in place, including internal reporting systems and monitoring when necessary. But for lawyers working alone or who only have subordinates, it’s a lot less likely there will be anyone able to intervene informally, if at all, before serious issues arise.

The Last Resort
McLean eventually gave up on the lawyers’ assistance program and started calling the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission’s ethics hotline. But she hit a dead end there, too.

She knew filing a formal complaint would likely end Fritzshall’s career, and wondered what the consequences would be for her own future. But his clients were real people, and she said she couldn’t just abandon them.

Less than three months after she was hired, McLean mustered the courage to tell Fritzshall she intended to resign and report him to the disciplinary commission.

“I figured, if going to the ARDC would do me in, this wasn’t the career for me,” she said.

She had him on speaker phone, with his intern at her side. The intern had been working for him for about a year and adored him, McLean said. At her fingertips was a list of his active cases—at least 20—detailing the errors she’d identified, along with approaching deadlines.

She told him she was confident that the ARDC would know whether her concerns were warranted.

“He turned on me,” she said.

Denial
In his formal response denying the allegations, Fritzshall stated, in essence, that McLean was inexperienced and simply didn’t know what she was talking about.

She remembers reading it and feeling disheartened, like it had all been “a stressful waste of time.”

The ARDC administrator filed a petition against Fritzshall alleging incapacity in August 2011. Fritzshall was initially responsive, but after he stopped appearing at conferences or otherwise complying with the investigation, the allegations were eventually deemed admitted.

McLean didn’t hear from the ARDC again until they called to ask her to testify at his hearing in June 2012. By then, Fritzshall had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s-type dementia, according to a letter from his physician that’s referenced in the hearing board’s report.

More issues had surfaced. Another associate quit after three weeks when Fritzshall couldn’t afford to pay her. He’d stopped paying rent on his office space. He’d overdrawn his trust fund account multiple times. He’d even bounced a check for $31.71 to a court clerk.

His wife had been encouraging him to retire, to no avail, according to testimony at the hearing.

When McLean testified before the hearing board, she remembers one member asked something to the effect of, “You left the clients? You just quit?”

I called you first, she said.