The Country Club: How Montana’s Legal Discipline System Protects Its Own and Exhausts the Rest

By The American Gadfly

There’s a country club in Montana that doesn’t serve cocktails, doesn’t host golf tournaments, and doesn’t require a membership fee—because you pay in silence.

This country club isn’t a social one. It’s a legal one. And it doesn’t protect the public; it protects the privileged. It’s not built on laws—it’s built on delay. On process. On exhaustion. On a thousand quiet dismissals before breakfast.

It’s called the Montana legal disciplinary system. And if you’ve ever tried to file a grievance against a lawyer in this state, you already know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, consider this your guided tour through a fortress designed to look like a help desk.

1. The Fiction of Oversight

On paper, Montana’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) exists to ensure attorneys adhere to professional ethics. It investigates complaints, evaluates violations, and—allegedly—prosecutes misconduct. The truth, however, is something else entirely.

The ODC does not discipline lawyers. That power, they’ll quickly tell you, belongs to the Commission on Practice (COP) and ultimately the Montana Supreme Court. The ODC merely “investigates” and “prosecutes” complaints. Which sounds active, until you realize that nearly all of those complaints vanish into the bureaucratic ether, never making it to formal review. The majority are dismissed after “intake” with a letter that says: Thank you for your concern. We’ll take it from here. Spoiler: they don’t.

The result is a legal protection racket in polite clothing. A bad-faith attorney can stonewall, intimidate, and manipulate clients—knowing that the odds of facing meaningful consequences are somewhere between slim and asteroid collision.

2. The Language of Delay

When pressed, the ODC doesn’t defend bad lawyers. It doesn’t have to. It defends the process. Like a sacred object, the Rules of Lawyer Disciplinary Enforcement are invoked as if Moses carried them down from Helena’s Mount Highwood.

Due process, they say.

But here’s the twist: this isn’t a due process environment. There’s no adversarial hearing at intake. No discovery. No meaningful voice for the complainant. The accused attorney faces zero restrictions—no probation, no license pause, no temporary suspension—while the case drags on.

And drag it will.

Because this system isn’t slow by accident. It’s slow by design.

Every procedural safeguard becomes a shield—not for the public, but for the profession. The burden of proof? “Clear and convincing,” just shy of criminal. Interim action? Not allowed. Even a substantiated violation doesn’t guarantee discipline—it merely enters a second gauntlet of “aggravating and mitigating factors,” which can twist an obvious wrong into a slap on the wrist… or nothing.

3. Exhaustion as a Tool of Power

Let’s call it what it is: procedural insulation.

The system is built not to adjudicate wrongdoing efficiently, but to outlast the complainant. To drain their time, energy, and resolve. You’ll get polite letters. You’ll get language that suggests action. But you won’t get accountability.

Instead, the burden shifts subtly but decisively: Why are you so persistent?
Why won’t you accept our word?
Why are you making this so hard?

Because when institutions can’t refute your claims, they will question your tone.

Persistence is pathologized. Emotion is weaponized. Truth is bureaucratized. And before long, the aggrieved becomes the accused—of bad manners, not bad faith.

4. The “Banter” Defense

In one recent case, the ODC responded to a complainant’s demand for action by stating they were “not inclined to banter.” Banter. As in, this isn’t serious. As in, you’re not serious.

That’s what happens when the people tasked with accountability are more offended by criticism than by corruption.

But this isn’t banter. It’s documentation. It’s resistance. It’s what happens when survivors of legal gaslighting stop trying to play nice and start writing everything down.

When someone invokes the ADA and says, “I require communicative accommodations,” and the ODC’s response is to frame their legally protected assertiveness as impolite back-and-forth? That’s not oversight. That’s systemic contempt.

5. When Courts Sanction the Shield

The Supreme Court of Montana oversees the entire disciplinary process. In theory, this is supposed to provide integrity and ultimate recourse.

But in practice? It functions more like institutional laundering. The Court rarely intervenes in disciplinary gatekeeping. The COP only sees what the ODC lets through. The ODC only prosecutes what it deems “worthy.” And every step along the way, language is used not to clarify—but to obfuscate.

Terms like “jurisdictional review,” “prosecutorial discretion,” “mitigating factors,” and “procedural protocol” aren’t tools of justice. They’re tools of delay, deployed by a system with no real appetite for self-policing.

6. Who Benefits?

It’s not hard to see who wins here.

Bad lawyers get to continue their practices unimpeded. Their clients, many already traumatized or financially strained, are told to wait quietly while the system "processes" their pain. Meanwhile, the legal establishment maintains its image of integrity without actually having to do the uncomfortable work of enforcing it.

This is not a coincidence. It’s a country club.

And the price of membership is impunity.

7. What You’re Up Against

Try going public about an unethical Montana attorney and see what happens.

They’ll tell you:

• “You’re interfering with an active investigation.”

• “That’s a personal matter.”

• “The rules don’t permit us to comment.”

• “We understand your frustration.”

But what they won’t tell you is: “Here’s how we’re protecting the public.”

Because they’re not.

The system is designed to maintain plausible deniability at every turn. Everyone has a title. Everyone follows “procedure.” No one takes responsibility. And if a lawyer lies, manipulates, or abuses their position, the system asks: Did you file the right form?

Not: Did this person suffer unjustly?

8. The Mission Drift

Somewhere along the line, the mission became preserve the profession instead of protect the people. And it shows.

A disciplinary system that cannot or will not restrict a lawyer’s practice during active investigation—no matter how credible the allegations—has already failed. It’s not neutrality. It’s negligence. A system that punishes clients for speaking too loudly, but never holds attorneys accountable for deceit, is not a justice system.

It’s a shield. A club. A cartel in robes.

9. Reclaiming the Mission

“We cannot have a special Country Club for Montana lawyers where there's no supervision, a corruption free-for-all sanctioned by the courts and permitted by a feckless disciplinary Council that exists to exhaust aggrieved clients. I will do everything in my power to make sure no such Country Club exists, and it is my understanding that your mission is to do the same.”

That’s the contract. That’s the challenge.

This isn’t about one lawyer. It’s about structural rot. About a system that reflexively protects the powerful and dares the public to find the cracks. But those cracks are visible now.

And some of us don’t walk away quietly.

10. The Gadfly’s Final Word

If you are a Montanan reading this, understand: the integrity of the legal system isn’t a niche issue. It governs divorces, wills, custody, contracts, land, and liberty. If the only people with power in this state are those who’ve learned to weaponize its bureaucracy, then the rest of us are just cattle with a calendar.

They want us to believe the process is sacred. But sacred things don’t fear sunlight. Sacred things don’t dismiss the wounded as banterers.

We will not be exhausted.
We will not be quiet.
We are not knocking on the door of the Country Club.
We’re kicking it in.