Lawyer suspended for accepting nude dances

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CHICAGO - An attorney has been suspended for more than a year for accepting nude dances from a stripper as partial payment for the legal fees she owed him.

The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission on Thursday said Scott Robert Erwin will begin serving a 15-month suspension for misconduct next month.

Erwin, who practices in the northern Illinois city of DeKalb, and his client mutually agreed that she'd perform nude dances for him in his office as a way to reduce her legal fees, the commission's report said. He credited her for $534 toward his bill for services of various legal matters, the report said.
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While she agreed to the performances, the client contended he touched her inappropriately during those dances, and she went to police in 2002 with sexual assault allegations.

Erwin denied any inappropriate touching happened, and he was never charged criminally, the report said. He declined to comment on the panel's decision Thursday. The woman no longer works as a stripper, the report said.

I think the lawyer got a raw deal on this one... if nude dancing is legal, then accepting that service as payment is no more unethical than accepting repair services from a plumber or a carpenter... I don't get how the service added up to $534 though... how many lap dances did she give him?

gives a whole new meaning to 'habeas corups', don't it?...
Somehow, I think the dancing was more like 'a vertical expression of a horizontal intention'. Of course, lawyers @#$ing people over is hardly news...

Kind of sucks for the lawyer. What was so terribly unethical about this? Could he not legally have accepted payment from her and then turned around and used that money to pay her to dance for him? How is it different to skip one step in there?

Maybe she didn't have the money.

That presumably is why these arrangements were made, but I see no reason why an alternate means of payment is necessarily unethical.

If he did sexually assault her during the course of this alternate payment, he should be tried for that. But I don't see why accepting lap dances in lieu of payment is illegal (or "misconduct". I'm not sure what that means re:legality, but I assume the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission is a government institution, so it must have been something illegal). It's just bartering services for services.