USA Legal Documents

The District of Columbia Bar has recommended that former Saul Ewing and Venable partner Sheryl Robinson Wood be publicly censured after admitting to "intimate contact" with former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick while she served as a court-appointed monitor of the city's police department, according to The Detroit News.

As The Am Law Daily recently reported, the Detroit City Council has approved a $350,000 settlement with Saul Ewing and Venable over legal fees that Wood billed in connection with her time overseeing Detroit's police department from 2003 to 2009, a result of a settlement with the Justice Department's civil rights division.

Wood stepped down as the city's federal police monitor in July 2009 and left Venable the following September after the FBI uncovered text messages that she and Kilpatrick exchanged suggesting a romantic relationship between the two.

Kilpatrick, whose own myriad legal issues have been chronicled in this space, has acknowledged in a deposition that he had an extramarital affair with Wood.

The Detroit News obtained a transcript of a hearing before a D.C. Bar disciplinary board last month at which Wood said she had acted inappropriately by having "intimate contact" with Kilpatrick.

"At the time I considered it, and since then, to be a moral transgression on my part," Wood said when asked by the board whether she felt she had done something wrong. "And, you know, something that I obviously greatly regret….I understand certainly now, and have come to understand, that it was also a violation of my duties as a lawyer."

Beyond the reference to "intimate contact," the transcript does not detail the circumstances surrounding Wood's liaison with Kilpatrick, according to The Detroit News, which notes that Kilpatrick described the encounter in a deposition as "an intimate session one night in a hotel."

Detroit sued Wood and three of her former employers during her time as monitor—Saul Ewing, Venable, and risk consulting firm Kroll—in June seeking $10 million in fees paid out in connection with invoices the city claims were fraudulent because of Wood's relationship with Kilpatrick. (The city's suit against Wood and Kroll is proceeding.)

According to a 12-page report issued September 13 by a three-person ad hoc committee of the D.C. Court of Appeals, Wood's actions merit a public censure, a step below the more severe punishments of suspension or disbarment. The report notes that Wood has agreed to accept the censure. The appeals court will ultimately decide Wood's punishment, according to The Detroit News.

The disciplinary panel's members—Ivins, Phillips & Barker managing partner Eric Fox, Sharp & Associates partner Stephen Grafman, and Janice Buie—ruled that Wood's conduct did not harm her client and that she had taken full responsibility and cooperated fully with the D.C. Bar counsel's investigation.

The panel reported that Wood had no personal contact with Kilpatrick for "the vast majority of her time" as monitor from 2005 through her resignation in July 2009. The panel also found no evidence that Wood's work was influenced by her contact with Kilpatrick or that she had any history of disciplinary violations.

The panel also notes that payments by Detroit to an employer of the outside monitor were already negotiated in 2003 before any official contracts began, and that no fees were paid directly to Wood. Her abrupt resignation in 2009 also did not harm the city, the panel said.

Wood issued oversight reports in her role as monitor, a position created through a federal consent degree between the Justice Department and Detroit's police department, which was being probed for police misconduct and poor conditions in city jails. While Detroit has struggled with an upsurge in violent crime in recent years, Wood's replacement as monitor, former federal deputy drug czar Robert Warshaw, wrote in a recent report that the city's police department has made progress on court-ordered changes to its operations.