Legal Weasel

Jacal says that she confronted her boss about it, but Ceja did nothing. “I refused to work with Mike Sneed. He’d take the money and not do the job,” Jacal says. “But Carmen, for whatever reason, continued to work with him.”

Sneed calls this allegation a “bold-faced lie.” He also denies that he has a partnership with Ceja. It’s just two people sharing office space, in a similar line of work, seeing the same clients.

Whatever you call their relationship, it spells trouble for some of the most vulnerable members of Nashville’s Latino community, among them a woman named Margarita Kennen-Sanchez, one of the plaintiffs in the case against Sneed.

Kennen-Sanchez was a battered spouse whose legal status was tied to her marriage. She speaks no English. There is a clause in U.S. immigration law that allows non-citizen victims of domestic violence to stay here legally, even after divorcing their citizen spouses. She went to Ceja, who gave her the necessary forms and referred her to Sneed for legal consultation.

According to both the original filing of the lawsuit and Sneed’s most recent disciplinary petition from the state Board of Professional Responsibility, Sneed told Kennen-Sanchez that hers would be “an easy case” and charged her $1,500 to appear at an interview with immigration officials. According to the original filing of the lawsuit, Sneed showed up an hour and 20 minutes late. The interview was terminated shortly thereafter because he “didn’t know the law applicable to [Kennen-Sanchez’s case].”

As a result, Kennen-Sanchez’s status is now in limbo. She’s afraid to go back to her native Mexico to visit her children because she doesn’t think that the U.S. authorities will let her enter this country upon her return. This is the same reason that she could not attend her brother’s funeral after his death last summer. She has since withdrawn her name from the lawsuit, and her attorney won’t say why. Sneed denies the claims that Kennen-Sanchez makes against him, saying, “Those allegations are untrue; that case was dismissed.”

At best, he’s only half right. The case against Ceja and Sneed has most definitely not been dismissed, and the other two plaintiffs are still listed on the lawsuit.

According to the recent petition for disciplinary action, Sneed is breaking the law by accepting referrals from a non-attorney (Ceja) and paying Ceja for those referrals.

Ceja’s attorney says Sneed is simply willing to take difficult cases other attorneys won’t.

And in a letter that Sneed wrote to the Board of Professional Responsibility responding to the above-mentioned petition, he said that Kennen-Sanchez misled him about the facts of her case and that she ignored his advice. As to the novel profit-sharing plan that he and Ceja had worked out, Sneed wrote, “Obviously, certain immigration attorneys are jealous of the work which Carmen Ceja performs and have launched a champaign (sic) in order to prevent me from continuing my relationship with Ms. Ceja.” Sneed’s professional relationships aside, even a brief look at his recent career reveals an attitude toward clients and their cases that combines deceit with either repeated memory loss or outright laziness.

Take, for example, Michael Austin. Back in 1999, a gang of plainclothes cops  caused permanent injury to his back when they mistakenly arrested him. He wanted to sue Metro Government for the cost of physical rehabilitation. His mistake was hiring Michael Sneed.

Sneed told Austin that he had experience with such cases, even though, according to the lawsuit that Austin filed against Sneed last year, “he had never handled such a case.”

When Metro lawyers asked for basic pre-trial information, Sneed didn’t respond and the deadline for doing so passed. As a result, Austin’s suit against Metro was thrown out. Austin sued Sneed for malpractice. Austin’s attorney, Larry Crain, says that Sneed’s behavior throughout the trial was strange. “He failed to show up for a deposition,” Crain says. “He called two hours before and gave some kind of excuse about a scheduling conflict.” The gaffe would end up costing Sneed over $700.

Sneed admits that he made an error by not filing one of the forms on time, but says that in a case like that, there are many documents that need to be filed, and he filed all the others “in a timely manner.”

He also admits that he can be tough to reach. “In the course of your day, I bet that you don’t return every single phone call that you get,” he says when asked about his aloofness toward clients. Yeah, but not returning repeated calls over a period of months? “I have a big practice with many clients.”

In the end, a judge awarded Austin over $24,000 of Sneed’s money. He has yet to receive a dime because Sneed has given notice that he wants to appeal the decision.