State Bar of Georgia ADA Retaliation Record

The Bar Record

Obstruction. Delay. Retaliation.

How the Bar answered a disabled complainant — and the two-tier system it exposed.

I am not guessing at anyone’s motive. On the record, in writing, on the dates below, I told the State Bar of Georgia that its handling of my grievance was obstruction, delay, and retaliation. Here are the things that happened, and the emails where I said so. Read them and decide.

Obstruction

I sent two rebuttals. The Bar received them, misfiled them, and dismissed the grievance as if nothing had arrived. It later admitted the misfiling in writing — and left the dismissal standing anyway. The donut hole in this record is simple: receipt was confirmed, file placement was not.

📄 Read it: the Bar admitted the submissions were received but not added to the file before dismissal

Retaliation

When I asked for disability access, a Deputy General Counsel put in writing that my request “may be directed less toward obtaining accommodation for a functional limitation” and more toward “securing a particular substantive outcome” or “a basis for further legal action against the State Bar.” Asking for access was recast as a tactic.

📄 Read it: the Bar questioned the purpose of my ADA request and denied Title II applied

Then the Bar treated my filings as a litigation threat and shut down communication.

📄 Read it: the litigation-threat shutdown

A watchdog cannot grade its own homework. When I named the pattern to Human Resources on June 8 — misconduct, harassment, and retaliation — I was quoting the record back to the institution that made it.

📄 Read it: I escalated to Human Resources and named it

Delay

The room kept narrowing. A scheduled call was withdrawn as if it had never been mine. Escalations met silence. Then, in a single day — June 30 — the Bar closed six of the seven related matters at once. The box looked full. Then you count what’s missing: a corrected record, a named independent reviewer, an answer to any of it.

📄 Read it: the meeting that was withdrawn

📄 Read it: the June 30 dismissals

The two-tier system it exposed

Now compare. James R. Westbury, Jr. is a former two-term member of the State Bar’s own Board of Governors. He was the respondent in one of these grievances. He got the formal process: a full caption, a recital of the allegations, and a clearance — mailed to him, copied to him.

The insider respondent was copied on his own clearance. The disabled complainant got a misfiled file and a one-word receipt from the man he was complaining about. Same office. Different clocks. Different audiences.

📄 Read it: the Westbury dismissal, respondent copied

📄 Read it: Same Office. Different Clocks. Different Audiences.

I did not call this obstruction, delay, and retaliation after the fact.
I called it that in writing, on the dates above, while it was happening.
The Bar had the emails. Here is what it did next.

The End of the Paper Trail

This is not a story about anyone getting away with anything. It is what the record now shows.

The Westbury grievance exposed the threshold problem. It was measured at the screening stage against a clear-and-convincing standard — a burden a complainant cannot meet before any investigation has happened. The burden became the ending. The public never sees the investigation that did not happen. It only sees the threshold.

Conduct I described in writing as harassment of a disabled complainant was still treated as not enough to forward.

One grievance against the Bar’s ADA contact produced a one-word receipt from the ADA contact himself: “Received.” Before dismissal, the respondent was visible. The independent review path was not.

By June 30, every file had an answer. The process still did not.

The burden ended the complaints.
The unanswered process is the record.