A local court has moved to suspend the law license of a Charlottesville attorney and former Republican Party candidate for the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.
The 120-day suspension of the law license of Michael Hallahan is set to begin on March 9, upon a finding in Charlottesville Circuit Court in December that Hallahan had misrepresented the time that he had spent as the court-appointed counsel for a client in Augusta County.
In addition to the 120-day suspension, Hallahan was ordered to pay $5,940 in restitution to the Augusta County Circuit Court on behalf of his client, Brittany N. Dotson.
Hallahan waged an unsuccessful campaign for the Scottsville District seat on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors in the 2019 cycle, citing among his reasons for running his desire to “find all the waste in county government.”
“I’ve had a lot of issues with the way they work their budgets, the way they capriciously raise taxes without even asking the citizens,” Hallahan told Charlottesville Tomorrow in an interview about his campaign in 2019. “When you raise someone’s taxes, you’re taking from them involuntarily. They’re already taking so much.”
Hallahan has also been in the news because he represented Unite the Right rally organizer Jason Kessler, and was briefly the attorney on record for Augusta County murder suspect Candi Royer, who was later convicted in the brutal killing of 3-year-old Khaleesi Cutthriel.
The Brittany Dotson case in Augusta County
According to the final judgment memorandum on file for the Brittany Dotson case, with a Dec. 9, 2024 file date, we learned that Hallahan had been appointed to represent Dotson on two larceny charges on March 31, 2020, and then was appointed to represent her on 18 additional charges in December 2020.
Dotson would ultimately be offered a plea deal in July 2021 that resulted in her getting a five-year sentence, with four years suspended.
The issue with Hallahan in the Dotson case is that he submitted List of Allowance forms claiming that he had given 90 hours of legal work to the case, specifying one hour, 42 minutes of “court time” and 88 hours, 18 minutes of “out of court time,” according to the final judgement memorandum.
The state paid him $8,010 for the claimed work, according to the court document, and that amount was assessed to Dotson as the court costs that she would have to pay to settle her criminal case.
Panel: ‘Ms. Dotson was essentially victimized by her own lawyer’
The three-judge panel unanimously found that Hallahan had misrepresented the hours worked on the Dotson case in the List of Allowance forms that he submitted, and the panel noted in its ruling that it:
“… obviously found some of the evidence here to be extraordinary; the idea of working between four and five thousand hours a year, carrying a caseload of 250 open cases, working a document that (Mr. Hallahan) described as being four times that of a public defender in this state. And it’s just hard to imagine that that comports with practicality or even reality.
“And so, the court has to conclude that given the evidence in this case that this was not an isolated incident. And that nearly $1.9 million includes probably, certainly, additional incidents of improper billing.”
More from the ruling:
“It is particularly concerning that in this case, Ms. Dotson was essentially victimized by her own lawyer in the name of utilizing the ‘budget’ for a case. Ms. Dotson should not be working out from under the burden of court costs that were duplicative and entirely unnecessary.
“She should not have to pay off the fees that were charged for reading the same code sections, the same annotations in the same cases, if that even occurred, over and over again.”
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Chris Graham
