OREGON
Oregonian
By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com
on August 22, 2014
The Oregon Supreme Court has suspended the license of a Salem attorney for 90 days because of the way he communicated with his clients as he divided up a settlement fund for victims of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.
The high court found on Thursday that Daniel J. Gatti violated professional rules of conduct by failing to properly explain and receive permission from the sex-abuse victims, his clients, when he represented them as a group. Gatti represented 15 men who as youths decades ago had been incarcerated at the MacLaren Home for Boys and said that they were molested by the facility’s chaplain, the Rev. Michael Sprauer.
Gatti represented the victims from 2001 to 2007 — settling most of their cases with the Archdiocese of Portland for $600,000 and, later, the State of Oregon for about $1.05 million. He took three cases against the state to trial — garnering jury verdicts of $590,000 for one plaintiff, $595,000 for another plaintiff and no money for the third.
Although Gatti said he was going to divide up the state settlement proportionately to how he divided up the archdiocese settlement, he didn’t do that, according to a supreme-court summary of the case.
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