Twin Cities lawyer suspended for forging client's signature, urging another to skip court

The Minnesota Supreme Court has suspended the law license of Twin Cities attorney Michael B. Padden and is considering whether to disbar him after a judge found that Padden mismanaged and misappropriated client funds, repeatedly failed to show up for court hearings, forged a client’s signature on a payment agreement, and urged another client not to appear for a sentencing hearing.

In an 82-page recommendation for discipline issued in December, Senior Judge Richard C. Perkins found more than three dozen instances in the last decade where Padden, 62, violated professional conduct rules in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Perkins’ findings came nearly a year after the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility filed a petition for disciplinary action following complaints from Padden’s former clients.

Padden, who was first licensed as an attorney in 1986, has been involved in numerous high-profile cases. In 2016 he unsuccessfully sued the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office on behalf of a man wrongly suspected in the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling.

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And in 2021, Padden filed several cases against the estate of Daunte Wright, a young Black man killed by a Brooklyn Center police officer. Padden’s clients claimed that Wright assaulted them, but Wright had never been charged with those crimes and at the time his family called the litigation character assassination.

Padden also filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of the family of Corrections Officer Joseph Gomm, who was killed in a 2018 inmate attack at the Stillwater prison. A judge dismissed the suit in 2022 after finding that Minnesota’s workers’ compensation law precluded the litigation.

Padden has not been accused of wrongdoing in any of these cases.

Padden urged client to flee Wisconsin

In 2017, Padden represented Steven Sweet, a St. Paul man who was charged with credit card fraud in Green Bay, Wis. A prosecutor presented Padden with a plea agreement offer in which Sweet would serve two years of probation and a four-month jail term.

Both Padden and his client signed the plea deal, and the presiding judge scheduled Sweet’s sentencing hearing. Ahead of the proceeding, Sweet traveled with his wife and their infant son to Green Bay, with the expectation that Sweet would be taken into custody.

A day before the hearing, Padden called Sweet at his hotel and falsely told him that a pre-sentence investigation recommended up to a decade in prison. In fact, the report recommended no jail time if Sweet complied with the terms of his probation.

“He actually told me to go back home into Minnesota, where I would not have a nationwide warrant,” Sweet, 40, said in a telephone interview Thursday with MPR News. “It would just be a Wisconsin warrant and to just watch my p’s and q’s basically.”

Sweet said he was surprised by Padden’s advice, but followed it.

“I had a newborn at the time, so I was trying to be a family type of guy. I was trying to stay by my wife’s side and help be supportive as much as I could.”

According to the disciplinary recommendation, Padden did not tell Sweet that prosecutors were likely to file additional charges for his failure to appear and that the court would issue a nationwide arrest warrant.

The stress of the situation took a toll on Sweet’s mental health. In early 2020 Jessica Weise, his wife, fearing that Sweet might harm himself, asked police to check on him. Officers soon learned of the warrant and arrested Sweet.

Back in Wisconsin, the court revoked Sweet’s bond. Sweet said that he tried to explain to the judge that he was only following his lawyer’s advice.

“He didn’t believe a word I said,” Sweet recalls. “He thought I was lying.”

Brown County Judge Marc Hammer imposed a much harsher sentence than the probationary term that Padden had negotiated on Sweet’s behalf nearly three years earlier.

Sweet was sent to the Wisconsin state prison in Waupun just as the pandemic began. He said he feared that he would die from COVID-19 as the virus spread among inmates.

Sweet’s incarceration took a heavy toll on his family.

In a separate interview, Wiese said that she had to raise their son and her other children alone and she worried constantly about her husband’s health. To supplement her income as a medical coder, Wiese said she had to take a second job working nights at a warehouse to make ends meet.

“I was working between 60 and 70 hours a week just to keep us above water,” Wiese said.

After being locked up for more than two years, Sweet left prison in early 2022 and returned to his family in Minnesota. Today he’s working as a restaurant cook and attending culinary school.

Wiese said at first, she and Sweet trusted Padden, whom she described as personable and charismatic.

“He really seemed to have us both convinced that he knew exactly the law and could get a very light sentence, and possibly even get it dismissed.”

Forged client signature

In a separate case, Padden promised to refund most of his fee if he failed to get a “good deal” for client Jorge Valdovinos-Chavez, who was convicted in Ramsey County on drug charges in 2013.

Federal immigration officials deported Valdovinos-Chavez to Mexico, but he soon re-entered the United States illegally. Authorities in California caught up with Valdovinos-Chavez in 2021 and extradited him to Minnesota for sentencing.

According to the disciplinary recommendation, Padden told Valdovinos-Chavez that if he received a sentence of more than one year, which would trigger deportation proceedings, Padden would refund $25,000 of the $30,000 fee that Valdovinos-Chavez had paid him for legal services.

In 2022, a judge sentenced Valdovinos-Chavez to 20 months, but Padden “failed to refund any portion” of the $25,000 to Valdovinos-Chavez, Perkins wrote.

During a jailhouse meeting, Padden asked Valdovinos-Chavez for permission to keep the money. Valdovinos-Chavez declined, but Padden later sent a fee agreement amendment to Valdovinos-Chavez’s wife that appeared to have been signed by Valdovinos-Chavez.

“[Padden] never presented Chavez with the Amendment,” wrote Perkins in his findings. “Chavez’s signature on the Amendment was, therefore, forged.”

No-show in court

In multiple instances, the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility said that Padden did not appear for scheduled court hearings and failed to file routine paperwork on behalf of his clients.

In April of 2023, a Stearns County court sent Padden notice of a remote sentencing hearing for a St. Cloud man whom Padden represented in a misdemeanor prostitution case. Neither Padden nor the defendant connected to the hearing.

About 30 minutes after the proceeding was scheduled to begin, Padden replied to an email from the prosecutor and requested the Zoom link, but Padden never logged in. Padden later attributed his absence to “a calendar error” on the part of his firm.

The presiding judge rescheduled the hearing for the following month, but neither Padden nor his client appeared the second time. According to the disciplinary recommendation, Padden’s failure to appear “harmed his client,” because the judge was forced to issue a warrant for the man’s arrest.

Around the same time, Padden also represented a domestic assault suspect who appeared for a remote pretrial hearing before a Washington County judge. Again, Padden failed to show up.

The defendant reached out to Padden, who said that his phone had been stolen. When Padden appeared for the hearing “nearly two hours late, he was not dressed for court and offered no apology for his tardiness,” Perkins wrote.

Mismanaged funds

Professional conduct rules require attorneys to keep detailed records of trust accounts, in which client money and advance fee payments are held separately from other firm funds.

According to an audit cited in the disciplinary recommendation, Padden’s trust account balance “was repeatedly less than the total amount of client funds” that he should have held in the account, and that “some of this misappropriation was for [Padden’s] own benefit.”

On dozens of occasions, Padden “paid himself from other client money” after depleting funds from the trust account to which he was legally entitled.

“At times, [Padden] would make serial disbursements to himself while the trust account was reporting a shortage,” Perkins wrote.

Kate Kruse, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, teaches and writes about legal ethics and attorneys’ professional responsibility. Kruse, who was not part of the investigation into Padden, said in an interview Wednesday that the rules are meant to protect clients financially and legally.

“They’re in a business relationship with their client, but they’re also in a fiduciary relationship where they need to act in the client’s interest and put the client’s interest above their own,” Kruse said.

After reviewing the disciplinary recommendation for MPR News, Kruse said it outlines an extreme example and pervasive pattern of misconduct.

“If every client asked for their money back, there wouldn’t have been enough money there,” Kruse said. “That’s the overall financial pattern. But then the attorney continued to cover this up by lying and engaging in fraud and taking advantage of clients.”

Padden responds

According to the disciplinary recommendation, Padden “testified that he has recently been diagnosed with PTSD, and that he believes he has suffered from depression for most of his life.”

But Judge Perkins wrote that Padden offered no medical opinions, records, or physician testimony to support his testimony, and there are “no other factors” that mitigate his misconduct.

In a statement to MPR News, Padden said that “For over four years, I have put up with a witch hunt and constant harassment” from state regulators. Padden said accounts show that “I saved my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars and stole from no client.”

He called the OLPR “evil” and said that he’s confident that he “will receive relief from the Minnesota Supreme Court.”

Padden has until early February to file a brief in response to Perkins’ disbarment recommendation. In the coming months the court is expected to hold oral arguments over whether to disbar Padden.

State records show that Padden has been disciplined three times before. In 1996 he was issued an admonition for failing to enter into a written contingent fee agreement with a client and failing to return the client’s file.

In 2017 he received a public reprimand for agreeing to settle a case without the client’s consent. About 18 months later, the court admonished him for failing to make proper deposits into a trust account and not maintaining receipts of cash payments.

In the conclusion of his disciplinary recommendation, Perkins wrote that the OLPR proved “by clear and convincing evidence the who, what and how,” but noted that the why “may very well remain unknown.”