On the morning of Jan. 25, Bernard Maurice Ellis walked into One Prudential Plaza to face his accusers. He took the elevator to Suite 1100, walked through the doors and turned left into Hearing Room 1, a teal carpet under his feet and bright lights overhead. He sat at the defendant's desk.

Across the room two attorneys prepared to argue that Ellis, a practicing lawyer in Chicago since 1959, ought to be disbarred. The hearing was scheduled for 9 a.m. At 9:10, Scott Renfroe, one of the prosecutors, handed Ellis a binder of documents, warning him that there had been some changes since the last binder he received.

"How am I supposed to know what's in here?" Ellis asked.

"Pay attention," Renfroe said.

"That's cute," replied Ellis.

That rancor characterized the rest of the hearing. At 9:20, Mary Robinson, the administrator of the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, began her opening statement, describing to a hearing board why Ellis ought not be able to practice law anymore.

Throughout the arduous hearing, Ellis frequently objected to Robinson's questioning of witnesses, clearly frustrating the prosecutors and testing the patience of the hearing board. At the end of the day, his livelihood still hung in the balance.

The allegations against Ellis are fairly typical of those that bring lawyers before the ARDC. Ellis is accused of borrowing approximately $ 28,000 in 1991 from a client's workman's compensation settlement to help an acquaintance make an investment. The ARDC also alleges that Ellis illegally sold more than $ 52,000 in securities in 1992 from a client's probate estate, lending the proceeds to the same friend. And in 1993, Ellis was convicted of shoplifting a pair of socks and a tie from the Marshall Field's store at the Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie. In the hearing Ellis said the disciplinary charges were "filled with conclusions, inaccuracies and half-truths."

In many ways the Ellis case represents the good, the bad and the ugly of the disciplinary system for Illinois lawyers. To Ellis, the ARDC is a harassing, lumbering beast, taking too long to resolve his case while depriving him due process. To the ARDC, the Ellis case is an example of the agency's resolve to protect legal consumers and punish lawyers who do wrong.

The ARDC will release official statistics for 1998 in April, but the agency expects to have investigated approximately 6,000 complaints last year. Most of those were dismissed. At least 133 lawyers were sanctioned, says ARDC Chief Counsel James Grogan. If this year is anything like last year, and there is no reason to believe it won't be, there will be roughly 1,800 complaints of neglect, 1,200 complaints of failure to communicate, 900 complaints of deception, 800 complaints of excessive fees, 500 complaints of incompetence and nearly 2,700 other complaints ranging from discourteous behavior to juror harassment.

After years of state disciplinary agencies being accused of going soft on their own, the ARDC says the steadily increasing number of investigations it opens is evidence that it is doing a better job than ever at disciplining lawyers. Ellis thinks the ARDC is in overdrive. "They're proud of being rough and hard and unsympathetic," he says, "as if that lends an aura of professionalism." Some lawyers who don't stand accused agree. Still others see the ARDC as a powder puff. Says Grogan: "We have a job to do. We're not in it to get a statistic. We're in it to see if misconduct occurred."

New Aggressiveness

Robinson, now in her seventh year, is credited by many with transforming the ARDC into a more professional administrative unit. "She made this a true prosecutor's office," says Warren Lupel, a Chicago attorney with Katz, Randall & Weinberg who frequently defends other lawyers before the ARDC.

"The game has changed substantially," says Richard Jacobson, a Chicago attorney whose firm, Flaherty & Jacobson, exclusively defends lawyers. Jacobson says that in the 1980s he could defend a client successfully by arguing before the ARDC that an aggrieved consumer could pursue civil remedies, and therefore ARDC action wasn't necessary. "That kind of thing just doesn't have any play any more," he says.

The new aggressiveness of the ARDC looks different depending on what side of the hearing room you're on.

"Once, only lawyers who were alleged to have committed egregious acts were investigated," says Michael Flaherty, Jacobson's partner and the national president-elect of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, which is comprised of attorneys who defend other attorneys before disciplinary agencies. Flaherty also alleges that unlike some other states, where big firms are protected by their clout, big firms are targets in Illinois because of the publicity it brings the ARDC and the "statements" those cases make to others as a deterrent.

Indeed, the number of lawyers specializing in investigating other lawyers has grown tremendously, says Michael Oths, counsel for the Idaho bar and president of the National Association of Bar Counsel. For this, Oths makes no apology. "Most lawyers are glad that we're out there. It's not that we're being too Draconian. It's 'Hey, get out here and do something about this guy or that guy.'"

While attorneys argue among themselves whether the ARDC is too tough these days, consumer advocate groups claiming to represent the public still complain that the ARDC is a paper tiger.

In fact, HALT, which bills itself as America's largest consumer legal reform organization, has specifically targeted Illinois' disciplinary system as "toothless." According to American Bar Association's most recent data, in 1996 just under 2 percent of complaints to the ARDC resulted in sanctions, compared to a national average of well over 5 percent.

Grogan says that comparing state data is risky because not all states use the same reporting methods. An admonishment in one state is a formal sanction in another, he says.

Still, the numbers indicate that if you are sanctioned in Illinois, you are more likely to be disbarred than in other states. In 1996, Illinois disbarred 15 of the 132 lawyers it sanctioned, a disbarment rate of 11.4 percent. In 1997, that number jumped to 56 disbarments out of 133 attorneys sanctioned, or 42.1 percent. Grogan expects the number of disbarments to drop back down when the 1998 figures are released, but even the 1996 percentage is well above the national average of 8.3 percent.

Seven-Year Itch

Ellis, 66, was born and raised in Chicago and spent his entire legal career there. He did short stints with the Cook County State Attorney's Office and as an assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago before settling into private practice as a sole practitioner. Ellis' works has mainly focused on commercial litigation, probate and elder law. He was never investigated by the ARDC until 1987, when a complaint about not complying with a subpoena was dismissed.

But in 1992 the ARDC received a letter from Cliff Sugerman, a man who had befriended Ellis but was then serving time in jail for fraud. Sugerman accused Ellis of looting client funds, and the ARDC opened an investigation. The investigation did not become public until June 1997, when the ARDC filed a formal complaint, but Ellis says the ARDC was mucking around for years before that.

In fact, Ellis' chief complaint about the process is that it has dragged on for so long. In a June 1998 motion to quash a hearing, Ellis said the ARDC had been pursuing him since 1994. "ARDC has allowed the matter to languish," he wrote. In a memorandum supporting a motion to stay the proceedings that same month, Ellis wrote that the his case was refiled in 1997 "after four years of almost total silence by ARDC."

In court papers Robinson blames Ellis for delays caused by his alleged failure to produce documents and requests for continuances. Grogan would not comment on the fits and starts of the Ellis investigation except to say that, "We have had in other attorneys a little bit more cooperation."

Ellis' other major complaints: that the ARDC traded information with the IRS, causing an audit to be opened; that the ARDC isn't respecting his 5th Amendment right to remain silent, which he says is necessary because he may be subject to civil and criminal charges; that as a sole prac-titioner he's at an unfair advantage facing what is essentially a well-staffed prose-cutor's office; and that the ARDC has shown him no compassion or empathy.

In court papers, Robinson calls the IRS allegation "absolutely false." She also says Ellis has been inconsistent in his 5th Amendment assertions, states further that there is no ongoing criminal investigation anyway, and says that while a 5th Amendment assertion is allowed, an inference can be drawn from it.

Scandalously Lax

Disciplining lawyers was once such a lax undertaking that a landmark study issued by the American Bar Association in 1970 called the situation "scandalous." The study, "Problems and Recommendations in Disciplinary Enforcement," became known as the Clark Report. It was the first nationwide examination of disciplinary procedures for lawyers, and its tone was set in the first paragraph: "With few exceptions, the prevailing attitude of lawyers toward disciplinary enforcement ranges from apathy to outright hostility. Disciplinary action is practically nonexistent in many jurisdictions; practices and procedures are antiquated; many disciplinary agencies have little power to take effective steps against malefactors."

The Clark Report urged a more powerful, professional and public system. In 1989, the ABA decided to review the progress made since the Clark Report. The effort resulted in "Lawyer Regulation For A New Century," which became known as the McKay Report. That committee found that many of the problems identified in the Clark Report had been resolved. Discipline was carried out by professionals, not volunteers. The veil of secrecy had been lifted, at least to a degree.

The McKay Report issued its own recommendations. First, it found that disciplinary agencies focused too narrowly on ethics violations, leaving consumers with nowhere to turn to complain about fees or general dissatisfaction. McKay also pushed for the judiciary to replace bar associations as arbiters. McKay's conclusion: "The public views lawyer discipline as too slow, too secret, too soft and too self-regulated."

Illinois was no different than in the rest of the country. "Lawyers had it easy for a long time," says Lupel. "Unless you killed a mother and three children, everything was OK."

Then came the twin pillars upon which Illinois rebuilt its current attorney discipline system. First, the federal Operation Greylord investigation into corruption in the Cook County Circuit Court, which began in the late 1970s, revealed a shocking pattern of misconduct, including fixed murder cases.

The ARDC was criticized for failing to root out the corruption, as 50 lawyers were sent to prison along with 15 judges. In the aftermath of Greylord, the ARDC began to wield Rule 774, then two years old, which allowed the agency to ask the state Supreme court to suspend an attorney's license immediately if the attorney was deemed unfit due to "moral turpitude" or whose continuing practice would cause "irreparable injury" to the public.

In 1988, a blue-ribbon commission recommended putting non-lawyers on the ARDC's hearing board and making the proceedings public once charges were filed against an attorney. Both recommendations were taken up-today one lay person sits on each three-person hearing board, and complaints against attorneys become public if an initial investigative phase finds probable cause. In making the recommendations, commission chair Jerold Solovy said of the ARDC: "They are more protective of their own than they should be."

In 1989, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected an appeal to reconsider his penalties by James Himmel, a Palos Heights attorney suspended for a year for failing to report another attorney's misconduct. The Himmel precedent sent shock waves through the legal community, encoding the responsibility to report on colleagues.

Still Under a Shadow

At press time, the Ellis case was in the hands of the hearing board. Most cases do not get this far; they are dismissed or a sanction is agreed upon between the parties. Ellis chose to fight. The ARDC's hearing boards are composed of two lawyers and a lay person, all volunteers. The board for Ellis' case consists of chairwoman Allison Wood, of Albert Whitehead & McGaugh, James Shapiro, of Applegate & Vaulaskas, and Marshall Rowe, who works for an industrial computer software company. Wood is the second chairperson Ellis has faced since July 1997. Shapiro and Rowe are the third panel members to hold each of their spots in the same time period.

On the day of Ellis' hearing, Shapiro missed the first hour. The hearing proceeded like a trial, with opening statements, witnesses, objections and motions. Board members, though, can question witnesses themselves after the attorneys are finished. In Ellis' hearing, the witnesses included a vice president of Bank Leumi, an operations manager from A.G. Edwards, a legal services officer from Harris Trust, a suitemate of Ellis', the brother of the deceased man who received the workman's compensation settlement in question, and a nephew of the woman whose probate estate was involved.

When the board reaches a decision, it will present a finding of facts and recommendation of discipline. The board has the option of dismissing the charges. The board's recommendations go to the state Supreme Court, which ultimately rules on ARDC cases. Ellis also has the right to appeal, in which case a three-person panel appointed by the state Supreme Court will hear the case and either dismiss or forward the case to the state Supreme Court.

In the meantime, guilty or innocent, Ellis continues to practice law under a shadow.