A Denver attorney who was caught sleeping with a client for a second time will be barred from practicing law for 30 months after admitting to that and nine other ethics violations.
Ian Hicks, a sole practitioner who passed the bar in 2007, also admitted to misplacing $10,000 that belonged to a client in an unrelated case and using an anti-gay slur.
Hicks’ suspension will take effect March 2. Before he can be readmitted in 2025, he’ll need to prove to a state disciplinary judge that he has been rehabilitated and is fit to practice law.
Hicks declined to comment on the suspension Monday.
Hicks’ first run-in with the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, which disciplines wayward lawyers, came in 2018. That year, he admitted to having a sexual relationship with a client in a civil case soon after she hired him in 2016. He also sent her confidential information about other clients of his, another violation of state ethics rules.
Hicks received a public censure for his wrongdoing.
In 2021, he admitted taking on a client he had recently been sexually involved with and then refusing to do any work on her case. He also admitted to taking on another client, receiving a retainer, and then similarly doing no work on that case. Both clients fired him.
Hicks again received a public censure for his wrongdoing.
Then, in 2022, the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel filed a lengthy complaint that accused Hicks of committing a much longer list of violations while representing two clients.
In the first instance, he was hired by Kathryn Cochran to sue her abusive ex-boyfriend, Dillon Emerson, in October 2021. Hicks and Cochran became sexually involved that same month. Emerson learned of their relationship when he saw flirty texts between Hicks and Cochran, including one in which Hicks mocked Emerson and called him an anti-gay slur.
Minutes after sending screenshots of those texts to his own mother, Emerson shot and killed Cochran, 43, while she was driving in the 8100 block of E. Dartmouth Ave., leading to a multivehicle fire. Emerson, 41, then shot himself and died at a hospital a short time later.
An online fundraiser for Cochran’s two children has raised more than $100,000.
Last year, Hicks sued Emerson’s parents, accusing them of defaming Hicks by filing a complaint about him with the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. That case was thrown out by Denver District Court Judge Eric Elliff, who also ordered Hicks to pay $15,673 to the Emersons.
In another matter, Hicks won his client a $30,000 settlement in a real estate dispute but misplaced $10,000 of the settlement and, believing he had received only $20,000 from the defendants, refused to pay his client until the full $30,000 was received. He later admitted to poor recordkeeping and wrongly commingling a client’s money with his own.
While not an ethics violation, Hicks has also been admonished by at least two Denver District Court judges in recent months for filing hyperbolic lawsuits in violation of court rules.
On Nov. 3, Judge David Goldberg rejected a lawsuit that Hicks filed on behalf of former tenants of the now-closed Grand Apartments because it used “trite and inflammatory language,” such as comparing The Grand’s swimming pool to a swamp in “Jurassic Park.”
Hicks rewrote the lawsuit and refiled it later that day. The case is ongoing.
Last month, Judge Ross Buchanan determined that Hicks had written a lawsuit full of “politically-charged declarations and personal attacks” and forced him to rewrite it. In that ongoing case, Hicks is representing Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a transgender activist and reporter in Ukraine who accuses a conservative podcaster of defaming her.
Hicks graduated from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2004 and the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver in 2007, according to his firm’s website.
This story was reported by our partner BusinessDen.
