Background
Nathan Todd Harvey was admitted to the Ohio bar in November 2022 after graduating from Syracuse University College of Law. Before and during law school, he worked as an investigator and legal assistant at the Britt T. Wiseman Law Office. In June 2020, Harvey was appointed administrator of the estate of Jason H. Sheppard Jr., who had died intestate. Harvey signed a fiduciary’s acceptance promising to keep estate funds in a separate account and to obtain probate-court approval before any fee payments. Instead, within days of depositing $230,022.62 into the estate account in August 2020, Harvey began diverting estate funds for personal use.
Over roughly two years and eight months, Harvey executed two overlapping theft schemes: he allowed 53 autopayments totaling $22,570.03 to be drawn from the estate account to pay his personal utility bills, and he wrote 32 checks to himself totaling $203,260, recording them as “atty fee,” “executor fee,” or “fiduciary fee” — none of which were earned or court-approved. He also made false answers on his bar application character questionnaire, denying any conduct that breached fiduciary obligations even while the theft was ongoing. When his supervising attorney Wiseman confronted him in April 2023, Harvey acknowledged the wrongdoing and promised to “make it right,” but continued to convert remaining stolen funds and removed the estate file from the office. His father ultimately provided a $203,260 restitution check; the remaining $22,570.03 was covered by the estate’s fiduciary insurer, Erie Insurance.
Harvey pleaded guilty in July 2024 to one count of theft by deception, a third-degree felony, and was sentenced to 60 months of community control. The Ohio Supreme Court entered an interim felony suspension in September 2024. After a disciplinary hearing in which Harvey stipulated to five rule violations, the Board of Professional Conduct recommended an indefinite suspension. No objections were filed. The Supreme Court accepted the misconduct findings but rejected the recommended sanction.
The Court’s Holding
The court unanimously adopted the board’s findings that Harvey violated Prof.Cond.R. 1.15(b) (misuse of client trust account), 8.4(b) (criminal act reflecting on honesty), 8.4(c) (dishonesty, fraud, or misrepresentation), 8.4(d) (conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice), and 8.4(h) (conduct adversely reflecting on fitness to practice law). The court concluded that permanent disbarment — not the indefinite suspension the board recommended — was the only appropriate sanction.
Beyond the three aggravating factors stipulated by the parties (dishonest or selfish motive, pattern of misconduct, multiple offenses), the court independently identified three additional aggravating factors: submission of false statements during the disciplinary process, refusal to acknowledge the wrongful nature of the conduct, and failure to make full restitution. The court found Harvey’s hearing testimony — that he believed Wiseman’s initial $195,000 figure included the utility-bill autopayments — to be not credible, because those payments were automatic debits, not checks, and Wiseman’s communications specifically addressed only the unauthorized checks. The court further found that Harvey’s repeated deflection of blame onto his wife at the hearing constituted a refusal to acknowledge his own wrongdoing, notwithstanding his earlier written admission. Justice DeWine concurred in part and dissented in part, favoring the board’s indefinite suspension recommendation but disagreeing only on whether Harvey should receive credit for time served under the interim felony suspension.
The court also noted that Harvey had failed to file the required affidavit of compliance following his interim suspension, remained in contempt of court as of the decision date, and had made false statements on his bar character questionnaire while his theft was actively ongoing — conduct the court viewed as compounding the severity of his misconduct from the outset of his legal career.
Key Takeaways
- Misappropriation of client or fiduciary funds remains a presumptive disbarment offense in Ohio, and the court will impose permanent disbarment — not merely indefinite suspension — when aggravating factors, including dishonesty during the disciplinary process, substantially outweigh any mitigating circumstances.
- A respondent’s mental-health conditions will not qualify as a mitigating factor under Gov.Bar R. V(13)(C)(7) unless there is an affirmative determination that the diagnosed disorder contributed to cause the misconduct; a diagnosis alone is insufficient.
- Deflecting blame onto family members or third parties at a disciplinary hearing — rather than genuinely accepting personal responsibility — can independently support the aggravating factor of refusing to acknowledge the wrongful nature of the conduct, even when the respondent had previously filed a written admission.
- The court may identify and apply aggravating factors beyond those stipulated by the parties and found by the board, and it reviews the record independently before determining the appropriate sanction.
- False statements on a bar application character questionnaire, made while misconduct is ongoing, compound the severity of the underlying ethical violations and weigh heavily toward the most severe available sanction.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the Ohio Supreme Court’s willingness to depart upward from board recommendations when the full aggravating picture — including conduct during the disciplinary process itself — warrants the most severe sanction available. The court’s identification of three aggravating factors the board had not found, and its pointed rejection of Harvey’s mental-health and personal-circumstance arguments as insufficient mitigation, signals that Ohio courts will scrutinize both the candor and the credibility of attorney-respondents at disciplinary hearings, not merely the underlying misconduct.
For practitioners and bar applicants, the opinion is also a stark reminder that character-questionnaire disclosures are treated as ongoing obligations. Harvey’s false answers on both his 2020 registration application and his 2022 bar examination questionnaire — filed while he was actively stealing — were treated as independent markers of his unfitness and contributed to the court’s conclusion that permanent disbarment was warranted. The one-justice partial dissent, which would have imposed an indefinite suspension, illustrates that the line between the two sanctions remains contested at the margins, but the majority’s reasoning leaves little doubt that large-scale, prolonged misappropriation combined with dishonesty in the disciplinary process will ordinarily result in permanent disbarment in Ohio.