Ruling lengthens attorney’s suspension over handling of 91-year-old woman’s estate planning

After reviewing a disciplinary board’s suspension of a White River Junction attorney’s law license, the Vermont Supreme Court increased it from five months to one year. C. Robert Manby received the initial five-month suspension from a Vermont Professional Responsibility Board disciplinary hearing panel in October 2022, based on what the panel found to be ethical violations in Manby’s estate planning on behalf of a 91-year-old client. However, the Vermont Supreme Court, which can review such decisions, ruled that a longer suspension was warranted. “Not for punishment, but to protect the public and maintain confidence in the bar, we conclude that a one-year suspension is appropriate,” the court’s ruling stated. The Vermont Supreme Court handed down its decision in August but the suspension did not go into effect until last month. The U.S. District Court in Vermont received notice of it this week. The decision cited the “flagrance” of Manby’s alleged violations and the “completeness of his failure to even maintain anything close to a normal attorney-client relationship” with the woman, identified in filings in the case only by the initials E.M. At issue were risky transactions that were directed “exclusively” by the woman’s son, according to the ruling, which “effectively overhauled” the woman’s existing estate planning at the expense of her and her daughters at a time when she was too frail to advocate for herself. Manby, according to the ruling, “ignored numerous red flags” concerning the woman’s competency and the “riskiness or the unfairness of the transactions” that her son directed Manby to arrange. “E.M. was obviously not competent at any point during respondent’s representation of her,” the decision stated. “E.M. was ninety-one years old, physically frail, and could neither identify her own children nor hold a conversation.” Despite making several transactions over more than a year, Manby never met privately with E.M. and never asked what assets she had or who she wanted to give them to, according to the decision. At one point, according to court filings, Manby drove from White River Junction to Burlington and met with E.M. and her son in a supermarket parking lot of a highway to notarize a deed. “This was the first time respondent met or spoke with E.M.,” the filing stated. The filing described Manby getting in a car with the woman and her son before riding with them to the parking lot of a nearby church. Manby then got out of the car and crouched down near the passenger side of the vehicle where E.M. was seated, “physically feeble to the point of being unable to turn or twist to face respondent, and hard-of-hearing,” the filing stated. Manby then provided E.M. with a brief explanation of what the deed did, according to the filing, and asked if she wanted to convey her home to her son and herself jointly, and she replied, “Yes.” The filing said he failed to discuss several things with E.M. that he should have, such as alternative estate planning options, the “advantages or disadvantages of the transfer” and the “possible waiver of attorney-client privilege that might occur when confidential matters were discussed” in her son’s presence. Manby has been licensed to practice law in Vermont since 1980 and has a solo practice in White River Junction focused on real estate and probate matters. He had previously worked with now-U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., in the law firm Welch Graham & Manby. According to the Vermont Supreme Court decision, the hearing panel found that Manby had no prior disciplinary record and there was “no evidence of a dishonest or selfish motive.”