Court Denies Disqualified Attorney-Relator’s Motion to “Correct” His Noncompliance with a Protective Order
Earlier this year, we wrote about a case in which a district court disqualified an attorney, Donald Holmes, from serving as a relator based, in part, on his use of information in violation of a protective order in a related case in another district court. See “Court Disqualifies Attorney Relator for Ethical Violations” (June 15, 2015). With Holmes’s appeal of that decision pending in the Fifth Circuit, he filed a motion in the District Court for the District of Columbia—the court that originally issued the protective order that Holmes violated—requesting that the court sanction him $1,000 and modify the protective order to permit disclosure of the confidential information to the DOJ and the qui tam court. The court characterized Holmes’s motion as “a likely attempt to show the Fifth Circuit that he has already been sanctioned by this Tribunal in the hopes of having the dismissal there overturned” but explained that it had no power to alter sanctions levied by another court.
