Alex Jones lawyer Norm Pattis gets a reprieve at CT Appellate Court. Case to continue.

An appeals court has given at least a brief reprieve to Alex Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, who faced a six-month suspension of his law license over the apparent inadvertent disclosure of sensitive medical records belonging to the Sandy Hook families who won a $1.4 billion defamation verdict against Jones two years ago.

The state Appellate Court on Thursday rejected most of the grounds on which Pattis appealed the suspension ordered by Jones’ trial judge, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis. But it said Bellis incorrectly determined what rules of professional conduct Pattis had violated, and how, and sent the case to a new judge to determine the violations and an appropriate punishment.

“We reject Pattis’ first two claims, but we conclude that the court incorrectly found that he violated certain provisions of the Rules of Professional Conduct,” the Appellate Court said in a decision written by Judge Ingrid Moll. “Accordingly, we grant in part the (appeal) and remand the matter to the court to vacate the improper findings, as well as the attendant disciplinary order, and to conduct a new hearing on sanctions before a different judge.”

A jury in Waterbury awarded the record-smashing verdict in October 2022 to 14 relatives of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims in Newtown and an FBI agent who was part of the police response. The jurors concluded that Jones used his far reaching broadcast platform to defame and exacerbate the anguish felt by the families with unrelenting assertions that the 2012 school shooting was a hoax perpetrated by gun control proponents.

The litigation, which continues to unfold in state appellate and federal bankruptcy courts, was particularly bitter. The Connecticut trial and years of pretrial maneuvering that preceded it was marked by sharp exchanges between Bellis and Pattis. The judge twice accused Pattis of violating rules of conduct and he repeatedly called on her to disqualify herself.

The improperly disclosed records are 4,000 pages of confidential medical and psychiatric records belonging to the Sandy Hook families. The records were part of 390,000 pages of materials the families were ordered to turn over to Jones, as part of the pretrial exchange of information between parties in civil suits.

Bellis imposed an unusually rigid confidentiality order to protect the records in part because of concern by lawyers for the victim families that the material would be misused by Jones. Also, at one point during pretrial proceedings, Pattis included protected information in a motion.

According to testimony in court and a comprehensive memo by the state office that polices lawyer misconduct, the highly confidential materials were among 390,000 pages of records on a portable computer drive. A careless decision by Pattis to share the hard drive with a fellow Jones lawyer in Texas last summer set in motion a chain of events that sent the material to lawyers who should not have been permitted access.

Pattis took responsibility for the disclosure. He was traveling Thursday and said he had not read the decision.

His office transferred the hard drive, without warning of its sensitive content, to one of Jones’  Texas bankruptcy lawyers, who said he ultimately decided he didn’t need the material and never looked at it. But the bankruptcy lawyer gave the drive to a second Texas lawyer then defending Jones in a suit filed in Texas by the parents of a murdered Sandy Hook first-grader.

A clerk working for the second Texas lawyer mistakenly made the 4,000 pages of protected material on the drive available to the Texas lawyer representing the Sandy Hook parents who, weeks later, won $50 million in their Texas suit against Jones.

All the Texas lawyers who had the material have said they never looked at the medical and psychiatric records.

Bellis blasted Pattis in a written decision imposing the suspension, saying that his “abject failure to safeguard the plaintiff’s sensitive records” violated a half dozen rules of professional conduct, including those having to do with misconduct and competence.

“We cannot expect our system of justice or our attorneys to be perfect but we can expect fundamental fairness and decency,” Bellis wrote. “There was no fairness or decency in the treatment of the (families’) most sensitive and personal information, and no excuse for (Pattis’) conduct.”

The Appellate Court rejected claims by Pattis that the way in which Bellis imposed the suspension violated his right to defend himself and that she was wrong in not acceding to his demand that she disqualify herself from involvement in the disciplinary process.

On the issue of whether Bellis concluded correctly that Pattis’ records disclosure broke a half dozen rules of professional conduct, the Appellate Court said she was not entirely right.

The appeals court concluded that Bellis was correct when she decided that Pattis violated rules concerning competent record handling, the safekeeping of property and misconduct. The court said Bellis also correctly determined that Pattis failed to supervise an associate in his office, but was incorrect when she concluded that Pattis should have been able to supervise one of the Texas lawyers. Finally the appellate court said Bellis incorrectly concluded that Pattis treated the Sandy Hook families and their lawyers unfairly because, it said, the disclosure was inadvertent.

Based on its ruling, the Appellate Court instructed a new judge to hold a hearing and decide on appropriate discipline.