Charts and tables of the analysis (in Hungarian): muk_fegyelmi_ugyek.pdf
On Sunday, I downloaded 1540 disciplinary decisions from the website of the Hungarian Bar Association (MÜK). My goal is to find as many useful things as possible, in as little time and spending as little money as possible. Let’s see!
1540 decisions have been published since 2006, covering 1490 separate cases. Of these, there are only 10 cases where both the first-instance and the second-instance disciplinary proceedings can be followed, while 227 are second-instance only, and in 52 of the latter, the first-instance case number has been anonymised (the first-instance case may well be in the database, but the link cannot be traced by an outsider).
Of these, there were 1114 cases where a disciplinary offence was established and the disciplinary panel imposed a sanction.
Of these cases, 75% were initiated on the basis of a client complaint, 15% on a report from the investigating authority or the prosecution service, 5% on a report from a court or other authority, and only five were initiated ex officio (0.5%).
The attached PDF presents the typical disciplinary sanctions in a chart, and the typical categories of breach of duty in a table (based on the number of primary breaches in each case).
More than half of the cases (605) involved two or more categories of breach. For example, it was typical that a lawyer who failed to comply with their duty to cooperate with the Bar also failed to perform their client mandate (158 cases).
For the leading “breach categories”, further analysis is worthwhile: what exactly did the lawyer do, and what did they fail to do? For the top three categories, the PDF also contains a separate table on this. However, it is clear that the more detailed the analysis we want, the harder it is to automate, and the more we would need the domain expertise (missing in this case) on the purpose and perspective by which we want to group the conduct giving rise to disciplinary liability.
A further lesson was that some 22 documents still contained meaningful personal data (name, bar ID number, telephone number, office address), and we immediately requested their correction.
