Background
Shakespear N. Feyissa, a solo-practice personal injury attorney licensed in Washington since 2003, began handling auto accident cases involving personal injury protection (PIP) insurance around 2009. Based on a misreading of Mahler v. Szucs, 135 Wn.2d 398 (1998), Feyissa came to believe he was personally entitled to an additional “Mahler fee” — a proportionate share of attorney fees contributed by insurers — on top of his standard contingency fee. He inserted a Mahler provision into some (but not all) fee agreements beginning in 2013, and over 16 client matters collected more than $48,500 above his stated contingency percentage, with his total share of settlements ranging from 41 to 59 percent. He also made repeated false statements to insurers and medical providers — misrepresenting settlement amounts and falsely claiming to reduce his own fees — to induce lien waivers or reductions.
In August 2019, Feyissa’s former paralegal filed a grievance with the Washington State Bar Association’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC), alleging client theft, directed dishonesty, and improper fee collection. Shortly after receiving notice of the grievance, and after learning from a mentor attorney that his Mahler interpretation was wrong, Feyissa contacted three former clients whose files had been cited in the grievance. He confirmed they no longer had their original fee agreements, then drafted and had them sign declarations falsely stating their original agreements contained the Mahler provision — attaching fabricated revised agreements. Critically, Feyissa had access to the original electronic fee agreements for two of those clients on the very day the declarations were signed, and he had inserted the Mahler provision into one of those originals to generate the false attachments.
During the subsequent ODC investigation Feyissa withheld the original fee agreements, submitted cover letters containing false statements about his inability to locate client files, and eventually produced the fabricated declarations to ODC in March 2021 as if they were authentic evidence. It was not until July 2023 — when a discovery order compelled production of three boxes of physical client files — that the original, unaltered fee agreements surfaced, exposing the fabrication. ODC amended the complaint to add a count of submitting false evidence, and a 12-day hearing followed. The hearing officer (HO) found six counts of misconduct proven and recommended disbarment, driven principally by Feyissa’s creation and submission of the false declarations, deceptive testimony about his files, and bad-faith obstruction of discovery. The Disciplinary Board unanimously adopted that recommendation.
The Court’s Holding
The Washington Supreme Court accepted the Board’s unanimous disbarment recommendation and ordered Feyissa disbarred. On the racial-bias claim — Feyissa’s primary argument — the court held that the record did not support his characterization that the HO relied on cultural stereotypes, ignored testimony from Black witnesses, or otherwise allowed racial bias to infect the proceeding. The court declined to decide whether the Henderson v. Thompson standard for assessing racial bias in civil jury trials should be imported into the sui generis attorney-disciplinary context, because even assuming that standard applied, Feyissa failed to make the required showing on the facts of record.
On the merits, the court held that substantial evidence supported the HO’s findings of fact, that those findings supported the conclusions of law on the contested counts (counts 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8), and that the HO committed no reversible error in the sanction analysis. The court gave particular weight to count 6 — submission of false evidence to ODC — as the conduct that independently justified disbarment. The HO had expressly stated she would have been willing to recommend only an 18-month suspension with probationary conditions for the underlying fee and disclosure violations; it was Feyissa’s deliberate fabrication of evidence and obstruction of the disciplinary process that elevated the sanction to disbarment. The court found no clear reason to depart from the Board’s unanimous recommendation.
The court also affirmed the Board chair’s award of $34,524.13 in court reporter costs against Feyissa, rejecting his argument that $8,983.98 of those costs should be reduced.
Key Takeaways
- Fabricating client declarations and withholding original documents from ODC during a grievance investigation is the kind of misconduct that independently compels disbarment, even where the underlying substantive violations might have warranted only a suspension.
- Washington courts will not graft the Henderson v. Thompson racial-bias standard (developed for CR 59 motions in civil jury trials) onto attorney disciplinary proceedings without adequate briefing on why and how it should apply in that sui generis context — leaving that question open for a future case.
- An attorney’s misreading of a court decision may be a mitigating factor for the original fee overcharges, but it does not mitigate deliberate post-grievance fabrication of evidence undertaken after the attorney learned his interpretation was wrong.
- Unchallenged findings of fact are verities on appeal; challenging only some findings limits an attorney’s ability to undermine conclusions of law that rest on the unchallenged ones.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that the gravest threat to an attorney’s license is not the original misconduct that triggers a grievance, but the choice to obstruct the disciplinary process itself. The HO’s explicit statement — that suspension would have sufficed for the fee and disclosure violations alone — underscores how sharply the scales tip when a lawyer fabricates evidence, deceives investigators, and withholds documents under court order. Practitioners facing grievances must understand that the disciplinary process demands candor, and that any effort to manufacture a favorable record will almost certainly result in a far worse outcome than forthright cooperation.
The opinion also flags unresolved ground in Washington law: whether the objective-observer standard for detecting racial bias adopted in Henderson extends to Bar disciplinary hearings. Given the documented disparities in how discipline is administered across racial lines in many state bars, this open question is significant and likely to return to the court in a future case presenting a fuller record and argument on the doctrinal fit.